(Dresden Mills, ME) Lewis Turco's latest work receives praise—his contribution to his genre has received recognition from many sources throughout the years.
According to the British poet Donald Davie who, as the judge in 1986 of the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award for Literary Criticism, awarded the prize to Lewis Putnam Turco for his book Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, the volume was “...not revisions but one thoroughgoing and far-reaching revision—of the course of American poetry through centuries, as commonly understood. It is polemical but good humored, lightly and racily written but with passion, deeply serious, discerning and timely.”
George Garrett wrote, “This is a brilliant study, refuting many carefully cherished myths with impeccably applied knowledge and with tight, irrefutable logic. Nothing is wasted. It will shake up those whose thinking has become more habitual than adventurous. This book will be enormously valuable, if only for the cobwebs it sweeps away.”
In 1991, Robert McGovern said of a subsequent volume, The Public Poet, “Here are five provocative Lectures on the Art and Craft of Poetry by Lewis Turco, a leading American poet and the author of what may be the definitive work on poetics, The New Book of Forms...He is also the author of six non-fiction books, including a critical study of American that includes, among other concerns, a definition of professional and amateur poetry, feminism, modernism, black poetry, and the influence of Walt Whitman.”
Lewis Putnam Turco, perhaps the most respected poet-critic, in the United States, is the author of more than fifty chapbooks, monographs, and books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction for over more than a half-century including The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, which has been called “the poet's bible” by several generations of American teachers and poets since its first edition in 1968 and through its fourth edition in 2011. The poet and critic James Dickey said in an unsolicited endorsement in 1986 that it “Belongs in the hands of every poet, student and teacher, for the greater good of the art.”
The Dialects of the Tribe: Post Modern American Poets and Poetry, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2012, 336 pp., paperback, $29.95, available online or from any bookseller.
About Lewis Turco
Lewis Turco received his B.A. from the University of Connecticut in 1959 and his M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1962. In 2000 he received a first honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Ashland University, and a second in 2009 from the University of Maine at Fort Kent. His poems, essays, stories and plays have appeared in most of the major literary periodicals over more than a half-century, and in over one hundred books and anthologies.
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