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. 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 Stewart's "Columbarium"
"These poems are gorgeous in themselves, but more gorgeous for the philosophical heft of the fabric they are embroidered on."--Dan Chiasson, "Poetry"
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"Disarmingly--and deceptively--direct, refracting light in every direction. . . . Stewart observes the world carefully and comes up with some startling conclusions."--"Library Journal"
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"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""" ""