Bonfire: a Writers' Resource - Book Review by Matthew Caverhill

THE NEW BOOK OF FORMS
by Lewis Turco
(a book review by Matthew Caverhill)

The New Book of Forms by Lewis Turco is essentially two books in one, being both a comprehensive breakdown of poetics in levels (A Handbook of Poetics) and a listing of the forms of poetry — both are helpful to poets of varying levels of experience.

In A Handbook of Poetics, the levels are arranged by depth, starting with the general structure and ending with the value of individual words. Turco discusses these topics in a very technical way, but does so in a way that is approachable for even the novice poet.

The first level of analysis is on the typographical level, which is the analysis of prosody in terms of line breaks, stanzas, strophes, punctuation and other forms of division that are most easily expressed visually. The second level discusses poetry from the sonic level, meaning the way constructed poetry sounds through parallelism, meter, rhyme and accents. Turco goes into historical depth in this section, providing examples of techniques and structures that haven't been used in centuries, and textual analysis that is rare outside of an English Graduate Study. The third level of discussion is the sensory, concerned with figures of speech like metaphors and similes, symbolism and imagery, while the fourth level of analysis is the actual syntax, diction and meanings of words, though not to the depth of some of the followers of recent intellectual movements would demand.

Following this is the meat of the Book of Forms: the actual listing/description of forms. Within this section of the book, expanded from the 1968 version, Turco discusses with some detail upwards of 300 forms and variations of poetry, and deals with some traditions that have largely been ignored in the recent past, including many of the Welsh forms of which many people would be largely ignorant. The way Turco presents the material leads poets reading the book to come up with viable forms of their own, encouraging experimentation with formal styles.

My one concern about this book is it seems to concentrate far more on the European poetic tradition, with limited coverage of other forms from around the world, aside from the generous sections on the Japanese traditions. Other than this slight concern, I consider The New Book of Forms to be one of the best books on poetry I've ever read: it has vastly improved my analytical skills as well as giving me, a traditionally free verse poet, a new appreciation of formal poetry.

The New Book of Forms is to the study of poetry what John Gardner's The Art of Fiction is to the study of the narrative form. Even if you don't really appreciate the merits of writing formal poetry, there is enough in this slim volume to improve many aspects of your poetic technique. I don't know if it could recommend it as a poet's sole resource, but it is an excellent addition to one's library.