Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959-2007

by Lewis Turco

Cloth Cover: $49.95

Paperback: $32.95

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Product Details:

ISBN: 978-1-932842-19-7 (cloth edition)
ISBN: 978-1-932842-20-3 (paperback)
Publisher: Star Cloud Press
Year of Publication: 2007
Format: Cloth Edition or Paperback
Page Count: 640, 6 X 9

From the Book's Foreword:

"And 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, not so much a book as a library of books, composed by the many persons who inhabit this haunted and perceptive poet! 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."
– Rhina P. Espaillat, Newburyport, Massachusetts

Also Available:

Satan's Scourge, A Narrative of the Age of Witchraft in England and New England 1580-1697

A Sheaf of Leaves by Lewis Turco

Lewis Turco and His Work: A Celebration

The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004 by Lewis Turco

Fantaseers: A Book of Memories by Lewis Turco

The Museum of Ordinary People by Lewis Turco

Additional Accolades:

"Lewis Turco is a realistic poet with a shrewd eye on the world. He depicts and embodies his world in resourceful poetic language. His poems please and delight."
– Richard Eberhart on Awaken, Bells Falling, Poems 1959-1968.

"He has the gift of seeing things and the gift of words and a mind to feel with."
– John Ciardi on Awaken, Bells Falling, Poems 1959-1968.

"Lewis Turco and I share similar worlds. Everything he writes about in The Inhabitant is part of my real or remembered world. There are many riches here. Reading the book is like going up in the attic on an autumn or summer night, to open trunks and fetch out strange images and treasures."
– Ray Bradbury on The Inhabitant.

"The Inhabitant is the best new poem I've read in something like thirty years."
– Conrad Aiken on The Inhabitant.

"[Turco] is really, it seems to me, doing what Emerson meant by 'sharing the circuit of things through forms,' making the 'forms...translucid,' so the light can shine through." – Hyatt H. Waggoner on The Weed Garden and Other Poems.

"Lewis Turco's poems get better, book after book. The Weed Garden...is [his] best. The finest of the twenty-one syllabic poems here are almost as good as anything new I have read in years."
– R. Dickinson-Brown on The Weed Garden and Other Poems.

"All these pieces in some way investigate archetypes of the horrible and fantastic. At their root, these poems are an acknowledgment of death and decay. No matter how metaphorically veiled, the dissipation of things haunts the house of The Inhabitant and these poems are that realization brought to fruition."
– De Villo Sloan on A Book of Beasts.

"I like the good, careful, clean writing all the way through. Hard to come by these days, unfortunately."
– Donald Justice On Seasons of the Blood.

"Stylistically, the poems are impeccable. If they come across as cryptic, it is because they are intended to function as Oracles: not as mirrors of the truth, but as tools through which an understanding of the truth may be approached. They collaborate with the reader, rather than instruct.
– Gene Van Troyer on Seasons of the Blood.

"That I must be impressionistic about the sequence argues Turco's brilliant success. The poems insist on response, even if the response is inadequate."
– H. R. Coursen, Jr. on American Still Lifes.

"All of nature becomes Turco's reflecting pool: darkness "sings" and silence "is hanging fire behind the moon." Nature's world creates strong sensory impressions in flame, wind, and whickering horses. Against these particulars human life is stilled, made to become but a part of larger cyclical patterns."
– Mary Doll on American Still Lifes.

"There are many reasons for being melancholy, but this book is not one of them. Rather, it seems to distance the reasons and hold the melancholy at bay, partly by its relation to Burton's [The Anatomy of Melancholy], partly by Turco's own – sometimes quite dark – humor."
– Hyatt H. Waggoner on The Compleat Melancholick.

"Reading these poems, we don't know where Dickinson ends and Turco begins."
– Kathrine Varnes on "A Sampler of Hours."

"I think Emily Dickinson would have been fascinated"
– Constance Carrier on "A Sampler of Hours."

About the Author:

When he was a year out of high school Lewis Turco began publishing his poems in the national literary magazines while he was participating in the World Cruise of the USS Hornet (CVA 12) in 1953. Forty-four books and more than a half-century later, he is Emeritus Professor of English Writing Arts, S.U.N.Y Oswego where, in 1968, he founded and for twenty-eight years directed Lewis Turco

the Program in Writing Arts. In 1986 his book of criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, published by the University of Arkansas Press, won the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award, and in 1989 the same publisher brought out his The Shifting Web: New and Selected Poems.

His most recent books are A Book of Fears: Poems, winner, with his Italian translator Joseph Alessia, of the Bordighera Bilingual Poetry Prize; his first book of memoirs, Shaking the Family Tree: A Remembrance, both published in 1998 by Bordighera; The Book of Literary Terms, The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship, 1999, a Choice "Outstanding Academic Book" in 2000; two companion volumes, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, 2000, known to many as "the poet's Bible"; and The Book of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, 2004, all three published by the University Press of New England. His most recent collection of poetry, The Green Maces of Autumn, Voices in an Old Maine House, published by the Mathom Bookshop in 2002, is a sequence of poems two sections of which, published as A Family Album, won the Silverfish Review Chapbook Award in 1990, and as Murmurs in the Walls, won the Cooper House Chapbook Competition in 1992.

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