Frederick Turner

Much of the poetry of Frederick Turner’s Paradise is traditionally rhymed and metered, and employs the veiled self-referentiality of earlier generations of poets (“the poet” appears in a number of poems). The themes of the poetry are also very traditional, focusing, as Turner points out in the concluding essay, on the conflict between earthly and heavenly baradises. It is a sign of the times that such conservative and traditional poetry can come off sounding radical, as in Turner’s paeon to America, “Why they hate America,” which includes these lines:

Because America has fought and killed and won
And always less cruelly than any other nation.

Because America sinned with its black slaves
And repented, and wounded itself, and sinned again,
And wounded itself, an confessed,
And made sin come out in the open,
And reminded everyone of his secret shames.

I found myself wishing for something more stylically adventurous, but Turner is worth reading because he says things in his poetry that few others say in poetry or prose.