Red Rover
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.
“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
“These poems are gorgeous in themselves, but more gorgeous for the philosophical heft of the fabric they are embroidered on.”—Dan Chiasson, Poetry
“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
"'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
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
Complaint
III. THOUGHTS MADE OF WOOD
The Complaint of Venus
Thoughts made of wood
Variations on <<The Dream of the Rood>>
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
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature | Poetry
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