The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics

Rating:
Summary: Improvement of the second edition
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Underrated
Review: 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."

Rating:
Summary: lots of good information arranged in a Borges-ian labyrinth.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: lots of good information arranged in a Borges-ian labyrinth.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Jam-packed with forms, flaws
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Jam-packed with forms, flaws
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Prosody restores discipline and respectability to poesy.
Review: This is a well written book suffused with brilliant elucidation of the art of poetry. In substantiating impalpable words, the author presents their appeal mostly to our sense of hearing and, to a smaller extent, of seeing ordinary words on a page and then in the mind's eye as we visualize the imagery poets invoke in extraordinary ways. "The Book of Forms" is a handbook of poetry that lives up to its name by covering all three traditional verse forms - lyric, narrative and dramatic - thoroughly but not before demonstrating the influence of sound and structure on emotion and meaning. The form-finder index alone, for which Turco "pioneered" some schematic representations of various poetic forms, lines and stanza patterns, is worth the price of the book. For the most part, the author avoids the traditional methods of scansion to promote his that could be more efficient in specifying the number of syllables and accents on a line, the rhyming schemes and the positions of rhymed and unrhymed refrains and repetitions.
At a time when poetry needs to be returned to respectability, (see Dana Gioia's excellent discussion, "Can Poetry Matter?" in the Graywolf Silver Anthology, 1999), the discipline of metered language as well as the elegance of figurative speech should be restored to poesy and this book teaches both very well. While prosody may very well be the bane of many interested in learning the craft of versification, a deliberate reading of this book will also reward one with a heightened appreciation of poetry. The book is more exhaustive than the creative, self-describing gem "Rhyme's Reason" written by Yale's Sterling Professor of English, John Hollander, and even more up-to-date than another acclaimed classic, "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form" by Professor Paul Fussell.

Rating:
Summary: A book I---unfortunately--turn to often
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A book I---unfortunately--turn to often
Review: 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.