The New Book of Forms

Fülszöveg

Poetry/Reference
Almost twenty years ago when it was unpopular for poets to write anything but "free verse" and "prose poems," Lewis Turco's Book of Forms was virtually alone in promoting an awareness of traditional verse structure. Yet over 25,000 copies were sold as students and teachers of poetry discovered the joy and creative challenge of penning rondelets, gwawdodyns, and villanelles. Now, at a time when anthologies of contemporary poetry show that formalism is on the rise, Turco's classic handbook has been expanded and revised for a new generation of poets.
The Netv Book of Forms contains over three hundred verse forms, each succinctly described in prose and, where necessary, with a schematic diagram. Many entries are followed by examples drawn from modern English poems that use the form and by references to well-known poems written in it. Each entry ends with complete cross-references so that readers can discover relationships and similarities among many of the forms. A... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Poetry/Reference
Almost twenty years ago when it was unpopular for poets to write anything but "free verse" and "prose poems," Lewis Turco's Book of Forms was virtually alone in promoting an awareness of traditional verse structure. Yet over 25,000 copies were sold as students and teachers of poetry discovered the joy and creative challenge of penning rondelets, gwawdodyns, and villanelles. Now, at a time when anthologies of contemporary poetry show that formalism is on the rise, Turco's classic handbook has been expanded and revised for a new generation of poets.
The Netv Book of Forms contains over three hundred verse forms, each succinctly described in prose and, where necessary, with a schematic diagram. Many entries are followed by examples drawn from modern English poems that use the form and by references to well-known poems written in it. Each entry ends with complete cross-references so that readers can discover relationships and similarities among many of the forms. A "form-finder index" makes it possible to identify the form of a poem by analyzing its rhyme scheme, meter, and number of lines; or, if a reader wishes to write a poem using a certain number of lines, this index will identify all the forms of that length.
What makes The New Book of Forms more than just an encyclopedia of verse structure, though, is the opening section called "a handbook of poetics." This surveys the two modes of writing—prose and verse—and discusses various prosodic and metrical systems. Turco defines such terms as antithetical parallelism, syllabic prosody, and vocalic echo, and he provides clear examples of the processes and methods of versification. Indexes of terms, authors, and titles round out this volume. Although the accent is on the forms of poetry, this book in fact contains all the information essential to a study of poetics from the Middle Ages to the present. Vissza