Twenty Questions by John Delaney

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