"A beautiful Selected volume of this masterly writer's poetry, giving us five decades of witty, intimate, and moving poems with the cumulative force of an autobiography in verse. Though John Updike is widely known as one of America's greatest writers ofprose, he began and ended his career with books of poems, and between them published six other accomplished collections. Now, six years after Updike's death, Christopher Carduff has selected the best of his lifework in poetry: 132 of his most significantand accomplished poems, from precocious undergraduate efforts to well-known anthology classics to the late-life mastery of the blank-verse sonnet sequence "Endpoint." Art, nature, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, and personal history--these recurring topics provided the poet ever-surprising occasions for metaphysical wonder and matchless verbal invention. His Selected Poems is, as fellow-poet Brad Leithauser writes in his introduction, a celebration of American life in the second half of thetwentieth century, and no one but Updike "captured upon the page, in prose and in poetry, so much of this passing pageant. That he did so with brio and delight and nimbleness is yet another reason to celebrate our noble celebrant.""--
An anthology culled from the award-winning writer's five decades of literary achievements features over one hundred of his most significant poems to share insights into his personal life and creative process.
An anthology culled from the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning writer's five decades of literary achievements features 132 of his most significant poems to share insights into his personal life and creative process. 15,000 first printing.
A beautiful Selected volume of this masterly writer's poetry, giving us five decades of witty, intimate, and moving poems with the cumulative force of an autobiography in verse.
Though John Updike is widely known as one of America's greatest writers of prose, he began and ended his career with books of poems, and between them published six other accomplished collections. Now, six years after Updike's death, Christopher Carduff has selected the best of his lifework in poetry: 132 of his most significant and accomplished poems, from precocious undergraduate efforts to well-known anthology classics to the late-life mastery of the blank-verse sonnet sequence "Endpoint." Art, nature, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, and personal history--these recurring topics provided the poet ever-surprising occasions for metaphysical wonder and matchless verbal invention. HisSelected Poems is, as fellow-poet Brad Leithauser writes in his introduction, a celebration of American life in the second half of the twentieth century, and no one but Updike "captured upon the page, in prose and in poetry, so much of this passing pageant. That he did so with brio and delight and nimbleness is yet another reason to celebrate our noble celebrant."
