The Inhabitant (1970) is the collection of poems that Lewis Turco has been heading toward for a long time. As his books have appeared his work has not only gotten better, but has changed. (p. 115)

Most of the work in Turco's First Poems (1960) is too stiff metrically, or too pretty, or too ingenious, or too heavily moral and wise. Depending on your tolerance for "promising" first volumes, you're likely to consider Turco's apprentice work "very pleasant to hear," as did Donald Justice when he wrote a Foreword for First Poems, or as merely a sort of unpromising game "exhibiting the most ordinary of all kinds of skill," as did James Dickey when he reviewed it…. What most concerns me here is the strenuous and irritating morality of the book, something the poet had to grow out of. Nothing is more aggravating in poetry than the presentation of conventional wisdom...