Synopses & Reviews
Red Rover is both the name of a childrens 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 forcesfalling and rising, coming and going, circling and centeringrevealed in such games and traces them out to many other cycles. The alternation of night and day, dreams and waking, the round of seasons, the whirling paths of planetary motion, the vortex of history as the founding, decline, and renewal of ways of life all orbit within this book. 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.
Praise for Susan Stewarts Columbarium
“These poems are gorgeous in themselves, but more gorgeous for the philosophical heft of the fabric they are embroidered on.”Dan Chiasson, Poetry
“Disarminglyand deceptivelydirect, refracting light in every direction. . . . Stewart observes the world carefully and comes up with some startling conclusions.”Library Journal
“Wonderfully imaginative. . . . Its as if the endless mutability and metamorphic power of nature find an echo in a series of malleable poetic forms.”Edward Hirsch, Washington Post
Review
“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.”
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 --Lisa Williams - The Hollins Review
Review
"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."
Review
“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.”
Review
“In these elegantly crafted poems, Stewart cocks her head and looks at the world a little differently, capturing an owls flight, a boys 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.” Review
"Among American poets, Susan Stewart is writing the most significant poetry of our time."--Lisa Williams,
The Hollins Review --Rita Signorelli-Pappas - World Literature Today
Review
“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.”
Review
“Stewarts formal dexterity enriches the book as form and content palpably influence one another. . . . This range creates a sense of profusion that complements the books redemptive vision of the natural world.”
Review
"The poems in Red Rover are profound, frimly grounded in the literary tradition and yet insistent upon reversal and chaotic, unexpected upending. They are a puzzle to return to over time and a blessing of immediacy."
Synopsis
Red Rover is both the name of a childrens 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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
I. SPRING FORWARD, FALL BACK
The Owl
Lavinium
Games from Children
my mother's garden
shadowplay
king of the hill
tag
red rover
Daylily
Oil and Water
Songs for Adam
Adam lay a-bounden, bounden in a bond
the names
the dream
the cool of the evening
lullabye
as clerks find written in their book
The Green
Thoughts made of cloth
II. THOUGHTS MADE OF METAL
The Erl King
Titus
The Former Age
When I'm crying, I'm not speaking
When I'm speaking, I'm not crying
Gold and Soil
Elegy Against the Massacre at the Amish School in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Autumn 2006
Wrens
The Lost Colony
Arrowhead
The Complaint of Mars
Prologue Story
Complaint
III. THOUGHTS MADE OF WOOD
The Complaint of Venus
Thoughts made of wood
Variations on > Dialogue in San Clemente
A Cone Flower
In the Western World
the sun is charity
a boy's voice
the window seat
the figure in the garden
a little room
the rocks beneath the water
there is no natural death
moon at morning
the fox
The Field of Mars as a Meadow
A Constant State of Gravitation
The Vision of Er
The Fall
Three Geese