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Selected Poems of John Updike
The best from Updike’s lifework in 129 witty and intimate poems that, when read together take on the quality of an autobiography in verse. • By a master of American letters and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.
“Updike’s gift for close observation, in these poems as elsewhere, is near to supernatural.” — The New York Times
Five decades of witty, intimate, and moving poems—written between 1953 and 2008—with the cumulative force of an unfolding verse-diary.
Though John Updike is widely known as one of America’s greatest writers of prose, both his first book and his last were poetry collections, and in the fifty years between he published six other volumes of verse. Now, six years after his death, Christopher Carduff has selected the best from Updike’s lifework in 129 witty and intimate poems that, when read together in the order of their composition, take on the quality of an unfolding verse-diary.
Among these poems are precocious undergraduate efforts (including the previously unpublished “Coming into New York”), frequently anthologized midcareer classics (“Seagulls,” “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” “Dog’s Death”), and dozens of later works in a form that Updike made his own, the blank-verse sonnet. The poems range from metaphysical epigrams and devotional poems to lyrical odes to rot, growth, and healing; from meditations on Roman portrait busts and the fleshy canvases of Lucian Freud to observations on sash cords, postage stamps, and hand tools; from several brief episodes in family history to a pair of long autobiographical poems, the antic and eclectic “Midpoint,” written at age thirty-five, and the elegiac masterpiece “Endpoint,” completed just before his death at seventy-six. The variety of the work is astonishing, the craftsmanship always of the highest caliber.
Art, science, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, the beauty of the man-made and the God-given worlds—these recurring topics provided Updike ever-surprising occasions for wonder and matchless verbal invention. His Selected Poems is, as Brad Leithauser writes in his introduction, a celebration of American life in the second half of the twentieth “No other writer of his time captured so much of this passing pageant. And that he did so with brio and delight and nimbleness is another reason to celebrate our noble celebrant.”
“Updike’s gift for close observation, in these poems as elsewhere, is near to supernatural.” — The New York Times
Five decades of witty, intimate, and moving poems—written between 1953 and 2008—with the cumulative force of an unfolding verse-diary.
Though John Updike is widely known as one of America’s greatest writers of prose, both his first book and his last were poetry collections, and in the fifty years between he published six other volumes of verse. Now, six years after his death, Christopher Carduff has selected the best from Updike’s lifework in 129 witty and intimate poems that, when read together in the order of their composition, take on the quality of an unfolding verse-diary.
Among these poems are precocious undergraduate efforts (including the previously unpublished “Coming into New York”), frequently anthologized midcareer classics (“Seagulls,” “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” “Dog’s Death”), and dozens of later works in a form that Updike made his own, the blank-verse sonnet. The poems range from metaphysical epigrams and devotional poems to lyrical odes to rot, growth, and healing; from meditations on Roman portrait busts and the fleshy canvases of Lucian Freud to observations on sash cords, postage stamps, and hand tools; from several brief episodes in family history to a pair of long autobiographical poems, the antic and eclectic “Midpoint,” written at age thirty-five, and the elegiac masterpiece “Endpoint,” completed just before his death at seventy-six. The variety of the work is astonishing, the craftsmanship always of the highest caliber.
Art, science, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, the beauty of the man-made and the God-given worlds—these recurring topics provided Updike ever-surprising occasions for wonder and matchless verbal invention. His Selected Poems is, as Brad Leithauser writes in his introduction, a celebration of American life in the second half of the twentieth “No other writer of his time captured so much of this passing pageant. And that he did so with brio and delight and nimbleness is another reason to celebrate our noble celebrant.”
- GenresPoetry
320 pages, Hardcover
First published October 13, 2015
4 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
John Updike
867 books2,410 followersJohn Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 16, 2022
Updike is a charming person: drastically smarter than the rest of us, smilingly poking and poking at all the old familiar wounds we get from being alive. Auden wrote that his thoughts went from poetry to God to sex without punctuation; Updike, punctuation always impeccable, thinks all these categories deserve their treatment, and that they intermingle. And so they do.
April 3, 2017
I liked his later poems the best.
June 6, 2019
In what I initially thought was a fine introduction to John Updike's Selected Poems, Brad Leithauser makes a distinction between Updike's fiction (which was lightly autobiographical) and his serious poetry (which was "naked"in its autobiographical character.) He seemed to be saying that by putting himself in play in his poems, Updike turned his literary skills on himself, generating scores of compelling poems. Well, I correct myself: that is exactly what he was saying and perhaps exactly why Updike's poems are not nearly as good as his fiction, just as he (and most writers, I would wager), was not as interesting as his fictional characters.
Updike was brilliant, gifted, erudite, and fluent in literary forms. There's no question about that, but the burden of his poems, focused on him, lacks the heft--the interesting context--of his short stories and novels.
He goes over much of the same ground in both fiction and poetry (memoir, too): Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, some Boston, some overseas stuff, but on reading this selection of his poetry, I felt his nakedness was a little on the thin side. He wasn't a confessional poet, though he had a good bit to confess; he was more of an observational poet. And the link to a story seems to be more vivid, in his case, than any link to his observed self (or should I say his self-observed self?)
So these are good poems because Updike was a superb writer with an inventive imagination, but the thrill of reading him describe the burning of a house or a massive heart attack or exquisite sexual encounters (or near misses) as it relates to his invented characters and their dramas isn't the same when it comes to Updike not exactly being so graphic in his more fey, shy, word-dancing accounts of working outside in the winter or contemplating the essence of granite or remembering his time at Harvard in an ode to the graduating class of Harvard, circa 1970 something.
Back to Leithauser: I don't usually read introductions and seldom reread them, but this time I did both, and I realized that he talked a great deal about Updike's fiction and not so much, really, about these poems. He did write, peculiarly, that Updike was a master of conjunctions and prepositions. Initially, I forgave this praise as one poetic technician paying homage to another. But on second reading, I thought, What a rotten thing to say!
Look, the business of writing introductions often is akin to receiving the black spot in Treasure Island. You're it, no way out, and you have to be generous to a former friend (I suppose) and a major writer--indeed, a writer much more feted than Leithauser. But this is why reading introductions is generally a bad idea. The literary game of I'll-kiss-you-if-you-kiss-me is constant, and Leithauser undoubtedly had better things to do a few summers ago than write an eloquently evasive tribute to a poet who didn't look all that good naked.
All that said, if you're a fan of Updike's (as I have been), maybe you would like to see him compress his verbal wizardry into sonnets and such. I won't say don't even if I clearly won't say do.
Updike was brilliant, gifted, erudite, and fluent in literary forms. There's no question about that, but the burden of his poems, focused on him, lacks the heft--the interesting context--of his short stories and novels.
He goes over much of the same ground in both fiction and poetry (memoir, too): Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, some Boston, some overseas stuff, but on reading this selection of his poetry, I felt his nakedness was a little on the thin side. He wasn't a confessional poet, though he had a good bit to confess; he was more of an observational poet. And the link to a story seems to be more vivid, in his case, than any link to his observed self (or should I say his self-observed self?)
So these are good poems because Updike was a superb writer with an inventive imagination, but the thrill of reading him describe the burning of a house or a massive heart attack or exquisite sexual encounters (or near misses) as it relates to his invented characters and their dramas isn't the same when it comes to Updike not exactly being so graphic in his more fey, shy, word-dancing accounts of working outside in the winter or contemplating the essence of granite or remembering his time at Harvard in an ode to the graduating class of Harvard, circa 1970 something.
Back to Leithauser: I don't usually read introductions and seldom reread them, but this time I did both, and I realized that he talked a great deal about Updike's fiction and not so much, really, about these poems. He did write, peculiarly, that Updike was a master of conjunctions and prepositions. Initially, I forgave this praise as one poetic technician paying homage to another. But on second reading, I thought, What a rotten thing to say!
Look, the business of writing introductions often is akin to receiving the black spot in Treasure Island. You're it, no way out, and you have to be generous to a former friend (I suppose) and a major writer--indeed, a writer much more feted than Leithauser. But this is why reading introductions is generally a bad idea. The literary game of I'll-kiss-you-if-you-kiss-me is constant, and Leithauser undoubtedly had better things to do a few summers ago than write an eloquently evasive tribute to a poet who didn't look all that good naked.
All that said, if you're a fan of Updike's (as I have been), maybe you would like to see him compress his verbal wizardry into sonnets and such. I won't say don't even if I clearly won't say do.
July 28, 2019
Updike late work, "Endpoint" is his best. Light prose some of the best. Recommend!
December 8, 2015
Updike was an accomplished poet. Although I most enjoyed the poems from Endpoint (his last volume of poetry), there are some affecting early poems such as "Burning Trash," "Shillington," "Seven Stanzas at Easter," and "Living with a Wife." But his later poems are more generous, and more wrenching in their observant yet reluctant acceptance of the reality of the body's decay and the inevitability of death. Beyond his unflinching observation of himself on evidence throughout his poems, there are poems celebrating his family, growing up in Shilington, Pennsylvania, and lasting friendships.
The book contains a generous selection of poems from Updike's eight published volumes of poetry. There are helpful notes about individual poems at the end together with a short chronology of Updike's life and publishing career.
The book contains a generous selection of poems from Updike's eight published volumes of poetry. There are helpful notes about individual poems at the end together with a short chronology of Updike's life and publishing career.
January 19, 2017
Bought this in London on New Year’s Eve on a whim. For reasons I can't explain well it sort of jumped off the shelf at me. Still undecided on how much I like Updike as a writer, but I enjoyed spending time with his poetry.
An excerpt from “Endpoint: Sprit of 76”
"Be with me, words, a little longer, you
have given me my quitclaim in the sun,
sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light
of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage
what in most lives would be pure deficit
and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts"
My favorite poems in here:
“Ex-Basketball Player”, “Sunflower”, “Seagulls”, “Fever”, “The Great Scarf of Birds”, “Dog’s Death”, “Midpoint: Conclusion”, “Crab Crack”, “To a Dead Flame”, “Americana”, and “Frankie Laine”
An excerpt from “Endpoint: Sprit of 76”
"Be with me, words, a little longer, you
have given me my quitclaim in the sun,
sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light
of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage
what in most lives would be pure deficit
and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts"
My favorite poems in here:
“Ex-Basketball Player”, “Sunflower”, “Seagulls”, “Fever”, “The Great Scarf of Birds”, “Dog’s Death”, “Midpoint: Conclusion”, “Crab Crack”, “To a Dead Flame”, “Americana”, and “Frankie Laine”
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews