Filing Order

by John Delaney

Overview

Though only a few of these poems are standard sonnets, I have been intrigued to experiment within their fourteen lines, sometimes with rhyme and a variety of structures, while still maintaining their strong (to me) argumentative, metaphorical nature. The form allows me to succinctly salvage people, places, things, and thoughts that are the heart of all poetry but are distinctly mine-without sacrificing their emotional importance and impact.

Read each "Poem as Map." From "Newborn" to "Cremation", from crossing the "Continental Divide" to straddling the hemispheres "At the Equator", from "When I Grow Up (Since You Asked)" to "Riding an E-Bike at Seventy", the poems in Filing Order cover the spectrum of time and place. They acknowledge we all have "Breaking Points" and "So Much Sadness/Sorrow Coming." They recommend reading a "Selected Bibliography" and taking in "Scenic Views." I ask the reader "Let Me Tell You What I Think". Say yes, okay. Listen "To the End" "And that is how I spent my life with you. / The years were fledgling songbirds; then they flew."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888389485
Publisher:	Finishing Line Press
Publication date:	03/28/2025
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.17(d)

About the Author

John Delaney retired after 35 years in the Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University Library, where he was head of manuscripts processing and then, for his last 15 years, curator of historic maps. He has written a number of works on cartography, including Strait Through: Magellan to Cook and the Pacific; First X, Then Y, Now Z: An Introduction to Landmark Thematic Maps; and Nova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888. These have extensive website versions.He has written poems for most of his life, and, in the 1970s, he attended the Writing Program of Syracuse University, where his mentors were poets W. D. Snodgrass and Philip Booth. No doubt, in subtle ways, they have bookended his approach to poems. His publications include Waypoints (2017), a collection of place poems, Twenty Questions (2019), a chapbook, Delicate Arch (2022), poems and photographs of national parks and monuments, Galápagos (2023), a collaborative chapbook of his son Andrew's photographs and his poems, and Nile (2024), a chapbook of poems and photographs about Egypt. He lives in Port Townsend, WA.