Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 6137 East Mescal Street, Scottdale, Arizona 85254-5418, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth $44.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paperback $32.95, 639 pp.
Is there anyone in American poetry quite like Lewis Turco — a prolific and highly versatile writer in all genres, a renowned teacher, translator, and a consummately skilled craftsman who also brought us The Book of Forms, that instruction in poetics that sits on the shelf of almost every poet in the country? It is a manual he has reissued and revised, adding more and more accuracy over the years.
The plaudits were well overdue when Star Cloud Press published Lewis Turco and His Work: A Celebration, in 2004. Now, Star Cloud has brought us Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959-2007, and what a stupendous work it is!
Turco for many years has written and published formalist poems under the name of his alter ego, Wesli Court, though Lewis Turco is often found writing in free verse, prose, and other genres, including memoir, literary criticism, and polemic, as well as plays and stories. Having published more than forty books, he is one of America’s most prolific and versatile poets. A thick volume, The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, also came out from Star Cloud in 2004. 
Donald Justice wrote in celebrating Turco: “Whenever I see in a magazine now a certain kind of poem—one witty and formally inventive and perhaps light-hearted, with verve and fizz and a few surprises—and if this poem is signed by a name unfamiliar to me, I tend to suspect that I may be reading the work of still another Turco spin-off. How many Turcos there really are I shall probably never know, but a whole townful would be all right with me.”
Felix Stefanile has observed, “Turco seems to have the whole of the English lyric tradition at his fingertips.” Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems certainly proves that statement correct. Turco has an ear for every sort of poem, meter, rhyme, or form, and no poet writing today can outdo him in skill. He can be exquisitely lyrical and marvelously witty and inventive. Obviously a wide reader, worldly and learned, he draws on many cultural traditions from Rabelais to Swift to Gypsy balladeer. He writes poems with Asian forms and Zen concepts, asks existential questions, and composes with Lorca-like musicality, as the preface to his Complete Poems, written by Rhina P. Espaillat, explains: “How fortunate the reading public is to have this wealth of writing by one of the country’s most interesting poets now in one volume…. It belongs on the bookshelf of every reader willing to risk the joy and anguish of hearing the world, having it speak to him as vividly, ambiguously and honestly as it speaks to Lewis Turco.”
At the end of “Millpond,” a poem written at Yaddo in 1959, Turco wrote,
This is the place where peace rests
like ferns beyond lilies. The trick is to wear it
as a mantle, but to know
cloaks for cloaks, shelters for shelters.
Beneath this revery of surfaces, fish wait
for the dragonfly's mistake. The
trick is to lose, but to own.
As a poet, Turco wears his mantle of peace, and while losing himself in poetry, he has come to own it completely. His Fearful Pleasures is arranged chronologically from The Sketches (1962) through The Green Maces of Autumn (2002) and takes us through A Book of Beasts, A Book of Fears, Seasons of The Blood: Poems on the Tarot, American Still Lifes and The Compleat Melancholick, among other sections. There are poems and centos based on lines from Emily Dickinson’s letters, because Turco can do and has done anything and everything, from mournful poems of lost love and youth to verses that roundly face death without sentimentality, to observations of the natural world and all its strange creatures bestial and human, to wisdom that runs deeper than many poets ever reach. Why he has not achieved a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award has more to do with the politics of poetry, and perhaps with his Italian name, than with his talent and knowledge of poetics. Like John Ciardi and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Turco has also worked in translation, and like Ciardi and Ferlinghetti, he is an artist who deserves more recognition than he has received. He is the granddaddy of the New Formalism while being consummately capable of the craftiest free verse. There is nothing this writer cannot write, it seems. Lewis Turco is a poet for all seasons, and we have all grown up under his tutelage, with his books on forms and genres on our shelves. In fact, he is an institution of American poetry.
As Dana Gioia has written, “Lewis Turco is one of the most diversely talented Italian American poets. [But why not just say ‘American poets?’] What a pleasure to read him….” And what a pleasure to read Fearful Pleasures!
This review by Daniela Gioseffi was originally published in VIA, xviii:1, 2007, pp. 95-104. All rights reserved.
