Red Rover (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Stewart, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226774554 ISBN 13: 9780226774558

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2011

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.       

From Publishers Weekly:

In this follow-up to her National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Columbarium, critic and poet 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). Beginning with children encountering the world through play, 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. Contemporary violence meets canonical literature, illuminating the repetition of history and calling for a reexamined culpability: War profiteering has many means, including/ the sale of poems against war. Whether it's the command of a window seat leading to a mediation on ecological disaster, or the discovery of an arrowhead (sharp enough/ to penetrate/ fur or hide/ or hated flesh,/ and pin it/ back to earth) to a question about imperialism, these poems ask the reader to register anew, from small changes of perspective, the darker implications what we take for granted, even when [t]hings beg to be used,/ to be turned, and/ the reasons to withdraw/ are hard to know. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0226774554
• ISBN 13: 9780226774558
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 115