"Red Rover" is both the name of a children's game and a formless spirit, a god of release and permission, called upon in the course of that game. The "red rover" is also a thread of desire, and a clue to the forces of love and antipathy that shape our fate. In her most innovative work to date, award-winning poet and critic Susan Stewart remembers the antithetical forces – falling and rising, coming and going, circling and centering – revealed in such games and traces them out to many other cycles. Ranging among traditional, open, and newly-invented forms, and including a series of free translations of medieval dream visions and love poems, Red Rover begins as a historical meditation on our fall and grows into a song of praise for the green and turning world.
About the Author
Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. A former MacArthur fellow, she is the author of five earlier critical studies, including "Poetry and the Fate of the Senses" (2002), winner of the Christian Gauss award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Truman Capote Award. She is also the author of five books of poems, most recently "Red Rover" (2008) and "Columbarium" (2003), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. These titles, along with "The Open Studio" (2005) and "The Forest" (1995), are all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"A profoundly imagined book, this is one of the most impressive and serious volumes of poetry to come out in the past five years. This is a book worth owning and returning to over many years... This book, like all beautifully made things, is likely to last under many weathers, however alert to perishability its author reminds us to be" – Maureen N. McLane, Chicago Tribune
"Susan Stewart's most fiercely intelligent and ambitious book to date... Readers of 'Columbarium' will be rewarded throughout by the poet's remarkable acumen and edifying sense of purpose" – Maureen Seaton, Boston Review
"These poems are gorgeous in themselves, but more gorgeous for the philosophical heft of the fabric they are embroidered on" – Dan Chiasson, Poetry
"Wonderfully imaginative... It's as if the endless mutability and metamorphic power of nature find an echo in a series of malleable poetic forms" – Edward Hirsch, Washington Post
"Stewart offers sequences and serial poems that move across historical time, and continually reveal the ominous hiding in the innocuous, or vice versa ('burning bread smells like baked earth')... This gathering of poems, with their masterful cadences, allegorically pitched narratives and various speakers 'bound deep to old griefs and wonder', build toward an indictment of aggression and war... These poems ask the reader to register anew, from 'small changes of perspective', the darker implications [of] what we take for granted' – Publishers Weekly
"Understated and Zen-like, these are carefully rendered poems. Setting a prayerful tone and somber theme, Stewart looks back to the Garden of Eden with a stunning evocation of the creation story and the murder of Abel... Stewart uses figures of speech and sound not just as a way to provide glitter but as a way to create contemporary versions of classical tragedy" – Library Journal
"What we cannot fail to hear, in 'Red Rover', is a wise and troubled lullaby for what may yet prove to be the infancy of our species" – Nation
"Formidable... Her strenuous devotion to the life of the mind doesn't stop her from finding artful ways of giving the call of the wild its due with incantatory conviction" – David Barber, Boston Globe
"In these elegantly crafted poems, Stewart cocks her head and looks at the world a little differently, capturing an owl's flight, a boy's voice, a terrible massacre in beautiful but unfussy language that wants to communicate. No nursery rhymes here but instead a deep understanding of the edginess and violence that seep unbidden into our lives" – Library Journal, Best Poetry of 2008 citation
"Stewart's formal dexterity enriches the book as form and content palpably influence one another... This range creates a sense of profusion that complements the book's redemptive vision of the natural world" – Times Literary Supplement
"To pick up Susan Stewart's latest volume of poems and to begin to read is to enter an enchanted place of childlike trust and imaginative force, tempered and unsettled by the dislocations of adult experience" – World Literature Today
"Among American poets, Susan Stewart is writing the most significant poetry of our time" – Lisa Williams, The Hollins Review
"'Elegy Against the Massacre at the Amish School in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Autumn 2006'... is one of the most significant poems written out of America" – John Kinsella. Salt Magazine
