Red Rover (Phoenix Poets) - Hardcover

Stewart, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226774546 ISBN 13: 9780226774541

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

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 this title

About the Author

Susan Stewart is the Annan Professor of English at Princeton University. Her previous books of poems, The Forest and Columbarium (which won the National Book Critics Circle Award), and her works of criticism, The Open Studio and Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (which won the Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award) are all published by the University of Chicago Press.       

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.”

(Ange Mlinko Nation 2008-11-17)

“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 2008-09-15)

“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 2008-07-21)

“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.”

(Barbara Hoffert Library Journal 2009-04-15)

“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 2009-07-17)

"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." (Sacramento News & 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." (Rita Signorelli-Pappas 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

(John Kinsella Salt Magazine)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0226774546
• ISBN 13: 9780226774541
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120