Endpoint and Other Poems

March 30, 2009
Many delights but very few surprises await Updike's admirers in this last book of poems from the prolific essayist and novelist, completed only weeks before his death. Much of it gathers calm, casual, loosely rhymed sonnets, first in autobiographical sequences, describing the first and the last years of the poet's life: “Age I must, but die I would rather not... Be with me, words, a little longer.†These sequences sketch Arizona and New England; single sonnets, placed later in the collection, offer impressions of Russia, India, the Irish seashore (“like loads of eternal laundry,/ onrolling breaks cresting into foamâ€) and of nearer phenomena, such as the noise made by men fixing Updike's house. Quiet poems pay tribute to golf and golfers, to Eros in old age and to “America, where beneath/ the good cheer and sly jazz the chance/ of failure is everybody's right,/ beginning with baseball.†Elegant samples of Updike's celebrated light verse are also in evidence. Mostly, though, these are serious, quiet, low-pressure, frequently elegiac poems, concerned with later life—â€old doo-wop stars,†for example, “gray hairdos still conked,/ their up-from-the-choir baby faces lined/ with wrinkles now.â€

April 1, 2009
Perhaps especially on the strength of this final collection, Updike may eventually be seen as one of the few major novelistsScott, Hardy, Meredith, maybe Melvillewho are also important poets. His reputation is as a writer of light verse that rhymes, scans, and makes us laugh. Guilty as charged, but not always on all counts. The sequence that names this book consists of unrhymedbut only once, eccentrically scanningsonnets and sonnet sequences that ruminate on Updikes own past and present. Usually dated and spanning from Updikes seventieth birthday in 2002 to the month, December 2008, before he died, these are personal but not egoistic poems. It seems as though Updike were aiming to record the end of the life of a successful enough American middle-class male, and in his novelists voice. He sees himself reminiscing, traveling, shopping, in the hospital, working (A lightened life: last novel proofs Fed Exed), always as an intensely interesting and affecting character. There is light verse in the books later sections, and many more unrhymed sonnets as rich as those of Endpoint.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)