$14.99
How refreshing, in the age of open form and the conversationally informal poem, to find a contemporary poet who brings new life to the short, tightly woven rhymed lyric! That’s the gift John Delaney gives in Twenty Questions. Not all of his poems are strict in their schemes, but many are, and they’re wonderfully succinct, verbally playful, and often very funny, as in the villanelle “Fashion Designer” (“Blessed is the man who counts his blisses.”) One quality I love in poems is wit and word play. Delaney provides ample samples. In the poem “Purple Finch,” he manages to rhyme “acorn” with “egg born.” “Eulogy for My Body” wins me over immediately with its opening line: “One thing I know: you’ll be the death of me.” This collection’s title, Twenty Questions, comes from a familiar childhood word game. And just as its title suggests, playfulness, pursued with a questioning curiosity, most often leads not to answers, but to more serious questions.
–Ed Harkness, author of The Law of the Unforeseen (2018), his most recent collection of poems
Twenty Questions
by John Delaney
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-969-6
2019
John is the former curator of historic maps at Princeton University. A graduate of Syracuse’s Writing program in 1976, mentored by poets W. D. Snodgrass and Philip Booth, he published his first collection of poems, Waypoints, forty years later. What intervened? Career, family, lots of travel. But the questions kept coming. Twenty Questions contains some of them.
Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri –
Washington Independent Review of Books
October 2019 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri
Best Chapbooks:
Twenty Questions by John Delaney. Finishing Line Press. 44 pages.
This is a sweet delight in self-reflection. And, of course, the deeper the well, the better the water. These poems benefit from a life spent in service to clarity and order, and it shows in crisp, pristine poems that reveal imagination, interesting subjects, and the writer in bright content.
Orbis Canis
What can you learn from an old dog you loved?
That food is a reason to jump for joy at any time.
That morning can never come early enough.
Never to shun a stranger at your door,
nor stop fawning over your friends.
To follow your nose to the source.
The contagion of enthusiasm.
A companionable silence.
How devoted subjects train their masters.
True to your breed, now you run to fetch
something that’s irretrievable.