Customer Reviews

New Rhyming Dictionary and Poets' Handbook

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4 star:		(3)
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I do a lot of translation/versifying and this book is an incredible tool. Far from being a crutch, it opens the mind to new possibilites of rhyme, which, once internalized, can be called up from memory without looking back to the book. In short, this book TEACHES you versification skills through exposure to rhymes. It also contains an extensive discussion of rhyming form and technique with examples. A must have for the serious formalist.

It's useful enough for a beginner, but then again, so is a website like www.rhymezone.com, which this book feels a whole lot like...the entries are standard-fare; nothing extraordinary.

The ~$12 price is fair, and I'm afraid that's all which can be said about this title.

Burges Johnson offers a basic rhyming manual for poets. The first 65 pages or so gives examples of various forms of meter and fixed styles of poetry. So if you wish to remember what trochaic hexameter looks like, you can find it here. The examples are of standard European lyric poems: Sonnet, Ballade, Chant Royal, Villanelle, Limerick, Rondel, Sestina, etc. There are no examples of Asian styles like Haiku.

The rhyming dictionary is organized by vowel sounds with the most basic sounds like ATE, IN, OW, EAR listed first and then more complex combinations listed toward the end. The listings contain simple words, so the rhymes will not have unique combinations. But it is still a great start if you find yourself stuck after the third ATE (pate, mate, gate...).

My main issue with the book is that it's a bit difficult to flip through. There are times where I will think a sound should be listed under OO and it's under EW. Also, because the simple sounds are seperated from the multi-syllable sounds, you'll have a break in the alphabetical listing. It requires a lot of flipping back and forth.

All in all, it's a handy reference which saves time.

I bought this for a youth. At first he was kind of dumbfounded, then a few days later he says, "give me a charge to write." I state, "write me a poem about the storm, I happen to love the storm." The next day he had a story/poem about me and the storm. He loved it, and I received the blessing from the giving. Thanks to the Poet's handbook...

I bought this used book. It fully complies seller's description, as much as my expectations: excellent condition, hardly used. I live in Italy, it tooks me 3 weeks to get it in my hands: not too much, after all. Completely satisfied.

Roberto Zucchi