Customer Reviews

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has the most poetic forms in one convenient place of any book in my university's library. It is especially good for Welsh, Irish and Japanese native forms. However, I have quibbles with the notational system and vanity of the author.

His example poems and "translations in the form" are simply not good. Too many of them are by himself or someone named Wesli Court and they are dull, dull, dull compared to, say, the sparkling examples in John Hollander's Rhyme's Reason. The form-finder index is a good idea, but since it doesn't include rhyme schemes or line-lengths it requires you to read entries on dozens of forms to find the one you are looking for. Rather than have the entries organized like an encylopedia, the information is in essay-like paragraphs, requiring extra reading and searching. Hardly "quick and easy-to-use." Finally, his scansion system is inconsistent and sometimes the accents are printed off-alignment, making it difficult to determine which syllables have what value. The meanings of different symbols change depending on whether the verse is quantitative, accentual-syllabic, pure syllabic or pure accentual; rhymed or partially-rhymed. He often expects you to intuit which is which.

All that said, this book does contain a wealth of information. If you are looking for a beginning introduction to poetry, I would recommend Rhyme's Reason or Timothy Steele's All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing. Pros will want this one on the shelf, and will be better able to take it with the necessary salt.

A great book for anybody studying poetry and prosody. In-depth explanations of forms (more forms then I have ever found in other books). Easy to read explanations on what makes a poem, a poem. The index of forms is a great addition for those of us who are always looking for new ways to express our ideas in a formal manner. The index contains forms of one-line, to over two hundred-line forms, enough to keep any poet busy for some time. A reference book that should be in any poet's collection.

Turco is clearly a man in lust of poetic forms and methods. How long he spent learning the art, compiling information on various meters, stanzas, rhyme schems, and the like, I can't say, but he's done a very thorough job. That he doesn't cover free verse is perfectly understandable as this is, indeed, a book of forms (but to dismiss it outright as poetry at all is part of Turco's trademark pretention). Unfortunately, for somebody writing a book subtitled "A Handbook of Poetics," Turco not only doesn't attempt to make this handbook easy to use, at times he seems to bend over backwards to cause as much frustration as possible.
Take, for instance, an example. Let's say you want to write a Spenserian stanza. Well, you go and check the index--there are four pages listed, but page 271 is in bold, so you turn there (be glad you weren't looking up shanty, which contains two listings, both in bold). Well, no such luck, instead we are told that the Spenserian stanza is discussed in the "section on Narrative Poetry." One can respect Turco's decision not to repeat information already stated, but to not even give a simple page number where an outline of the form can be found smacks of a pretentious "I already told you that" attitude. It won't take long to check the other three listings, but by then the annoyance has already set in.
The six-page specific form index, where poetic forms and stanzas are arranged according to the number of lines they contain would be quite helpful--if Turco provided page numbers here. Apparently because he put them in the misleading index there was no need to put them in a place where they would be easily accessible and more useful. An extra twenty minutes on Turco's part could have eased a lot of headaches.
This is a helpful book that would come in handy for any poet or prosody student. But after three editions and still being arranged in such a ridiculous matter, I can't hep but think that it's time a new Book of Forms written by somebody who is not Lewis Turco to be published.

If you are an English teacher in high school or college, or if you have any interest in writing poetry, you should not be without this book or one of its earlier editions. There is simply nowhere else on earth to find the wealth of information that is here. No other book on poetic form even tries to cover as much information as Turco does.

Some reviewers have complained that the book is hard to find information in, but I have had my edition for many years and have not found that to be the case. One reviewer complained about the quality of the original poems Turco uses to illustrate unusual forms (and did not pick up on the fact that Wesli Court is an anagram of Lewis Turco, so there are even more poems by Turco than it first appears), but keep in mind that those poems are there to illustrate the form, not to compete with Dryden or Swinburne. And they are VERY helpful--I would much rather have them there than not.

An absolutely indispensible book.

I simply cannot recommend this book highly enough. I ordered it in February of 2005, and it has been a wonderful tool ever since. But to start at the beginning: I had written poetry from a very early age, but had mostly written in common modern ballad form, and had never considered trying out the classical forms of the great poets of the past. I joined an online poetic community, and discovered that there are wonderful forms out there to use. I've often been frustrated by the proliferation of pulp "free verse," not the beautiful, thought-provoking stuff of say, Whitman, but very un-poetic ramblings displaying little or no talent. Well-written "free verse" is a treasure -- but the mediocre sort is nothing more than a trial for the reader. However -- badly written rhyme is even worse! Here, in the pages of Turco's Book of Forms, are exact instructions and excellent blue-prints for such flowing forms as the French ballade and ballade supreme, the rondeau, rondeau redoubled, the Welsh clogyrnach (a traditional bardic form), and many more which I have worked with myself with great success. So, whether you are an amateur poet just beginning to touch the waters of the literary world, whether you are beginning to see some success and want more resources, or even if you just want to read some good poety (there are wonderful examples of many of the forms within the pages), this book will make a fine edition to your library -- and I've no doubt that you will use it often, as I have.

Despite the success of the second edition, I still prefer my first edition solely because of the layout - the description of a poetic form is kept on a single page as much as possible; this generally means only one form per page. This is easier to use that having to flip the page to get the full stanza or to compare the schema to the example.

The volume contains a short chapter on meter - I prefer McAuley's Versification for this material. It includes a chapter on sounds and a chapter of tropes - there are several rhetoric books I prefer.

Then comes the glory of this book - the book of forms with a form finder and wonderfully clear definitions of the form. The language of origin of the form, the basis of its metrical scheme (syllablic, accentual etc), a description of the metric and rhyme schemes and a very clear notation illustrating the scheme are given. Variants are cross-referenced or included. Rather than including examples the book gives a bibliography of examples referring to poems easily obtained in standard anthologies.

This lack of examples forces me to give the book only 4 stars and recommend the second edition despite my personal preference.

Lots of cross-referencing to dead-ends, not knowing which list you're in or which one you `want' to be in. You begin to wonder if you'll ever get a sense of how this guy's mind works, and indeed why you should have to. Commonsensical and conventional devices like separating topics on the page with a space or two (when sample poems are separated from the rest of the text), highlighting or printing topic headings in bold lettering, printing page numbers opposite listed topics which are covered elsewhere-they are not employed. You can't tell if what you're looking at is a topic or a subtopic of something else. Exhortations to buy and refer to Turco's other book pepper the discussions.

The author is idiosyncratic and standoffish; he is not awfully encouraging. The precision in terms turns to nitpicking. So under "Free Verse" we are told that free verse is a contradiction in terms. Since this was said in the introduction and since we're supposed to refer to the index before turning here, perhaps we should have read or should now re-read these very general topics. He might just as easily have given us as meaningful a discussion as could be given of whatever is generally taken to be free verse, even with all the necessary clarifications.

A tough editor could redeem some future edition.

I keep this underrated volume on the shelf beside such indispensable texts as Paul Fussell's "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form" and John Hollander's "Rhyme's Reason."

I have been writing poetry since 1975. I have been writing and teaching poetry forms to new poets for 10 years. This is the best book available on the forms of poetry. It gives clear instructions on rhyme, rhythm, typical subject matter, and it includes examples to clarify the information for the would be poet.

"The Book of Forms" is an excellent resource for the study and understanding of poetic forms. Turco presents an abundance of information that will enable the aspiring poet to look beyond craftsmanship. The book is loaded with examples of the artistic possibilities of poetry as sonic and visual as well as written.