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Rating: 
Summary: Essential for the study, creation & teaching of poetry
Review: Clearly organized and logically ordered, this book details the architecture of hundreds of poetic forms from around the world. Each poem's structure is broken down into a basic blueprint then illustrated with real-world examples. The commentary is scholarly but never so dry as to be unreadable. An excellent "bathroom book" (able to be picked up, opened to any page and enjoyed in brief passages) as well as a clearly written resource for the student, teacher or active poet looking for examples to guide. Negatives: Mr. Turco does not often include the date a poetic form is first known to have been introduced. This would be useful information if provided. I recommend this book to all my poetry students and use it often in my work as a writer and poet.
GregRobin Smith, Seattle, Washington.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: I've never seen the original Book of Forms, so I don't know whether this update is worth buying as a replacement, but I do know that the new version is an excellent tool for people like myself who are trying to make their poetry more technical. It goes way beyond the typical "rhyme and meter" section in a creative-writing textbook; it gives lots of examples, some of which hold exactly to the forms and some of which deviate; and it gives appropriate cross-references. It also has a general discussion/glossary of poetry, and especially of formal poetry, so that you know what Turco's talking about when he starts referring to hendecasyllabic lines and so forth. Really, I have no complaints about it at all. Even if you only intend to buy a few books on poetry, this one should definitely make the short list.
Rating:
Summary: The premier book on poetic forms
Review: While I prefer my first edition solely because of the layout, this second edition has several advantages. Where the first edition had short chapters on metrics, sonics and tropes, the second edition has more than doubled the material included and divided it into four levels - typographic, sonic, sensory and ideational. Then comes the glory of this book - the book of forms with a form finder and wonderfully clear definitions of the form. The language of origin of the form, the basis of its metrical scheme (syllablic, accentual etc), a description of the metric and rhyme schemes and a very clear notation illustrating the scheme are given. Variants are cross-referenced or included. This material is basically the same as in the first edition. However, this book includes sample poems based on the structure as well as references in the text (unlike the appended bibliography of the first edition) of other poems in the form. Anyone who is serious about poetry - either as a reader or a writer - should consider Turco's Book of Forms as an essential resource.
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