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.