44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
See ya, Dutchy, April 5, 2009
Once I heard a neighbor refer to our author as "little Johnny Updike" and when Rabbit ran, he drove down Rt 222S not too far from my door. To me and a friend or two it trumped Kerouac. A little more subtle, you might say. One book a year followed, just about, mainly the novels, where the protagonist never failed to tell me exactly how the world was going to feel in ten years when I reached the author's age. I am really, really going to miss that.
Several writers have commented on the greatness of these poems. That does them a disservice, I think. Updike doesn't show in the major anthologies and there's reason for that.
These poems show a cannily perceptive person facing his old age and then, suddenly, his impending death. The first half dozen are recent occasional pieces on his last birthdays
"the snowdrops lie/in drenched, bedraggled clumps/their tired news becoming weeds..."
Then a half dozen or so on the final illness
"My wife of thirty years is on the phone./I get a busy signal, and I know/she's in her grief and needs to organize/consulting friends. But me, I need her voice..."
There follow twenty or so assembled to fill out this book on varied subjects and occasions. They're marvelous Updike. Updike on TV, Updike on Helen of Troy, Updike on Monica Lewinski, Updike on Updike's career. How can there be no more Updike?
I searched out his Shillington home long ago. Only a few years ago I found the hardscrabble, woodsy farm in which he and the Mother lived. Tiny little farmhouse defaced with prefabs sprinkled about. Up the hill is the Lutheran church where the pastor shared his shocking thought that little Johnny would only be seeing Granny in heaven again in some very abstract and meaningless way. Updike said he felt like reporting this heresy to every adult he knew.
The poems in every section feature Reading and environs, his family, his schoolmates, the Sweet Shop... small city life in Pennsylvania Dutch country.
"...I had to move/ to beautiful New England - its triple deckers, whited chuches, unplowed streets-/to learn how drear and deadly life can be."
Did I say I'm going to miss this guy?
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Farewell lines from a great American writer, April 23, 2009
This volume contains the last writings of John Updike. He wrote some of these poems when he was aware of the fact that he was dying of cancer. Updike is of course known as one of America's greatest second- half of the twentieth - century novelists. He is too known as its perhaps most accomplished man- of- letters. Through the years he too produced a considerable number of volumes of Poetry. They were skilled and polished works, works of a master craftsman as this work is also.
The volume also contains a sequence of Poems which he wrote at various birthday- celebrations. And too has a number of miscellaneous poems.
The most moving poems here are those in which he takes a look at his life as a whole, his childhood friendships, the tremendous transformations that Time has brought. The situation itself is a poignant one. We seek the wisdom of the great man before his going. We seek to understand how he struggles with the pains of his illness, and the fear before Death.
Updike was by all accounts an extremely cordial and likeable person. His great intelligence was coupled with a certain modesty. And this despite the dazzling character of his literary skill, his acrobatic stylistic brilliance.
My own sense is that his skill as a writer , or rather his many skills were more manifest in the longer spaces and elaborations of prose- and that the art of condensation which is poetry's essence was not really what his spirit was in tune with.
Nonetheless there is much to be moved by in this volume. And to be surprised by. Updike so celebrated and loved as a writer imagines in one poem he will be readily forgotten. In another he shows a religious sensibility a spirit of prayer. He is as always alert to the paradoxical beauties of the everyday.
Perhaps one could wish this last gift of his to us to be somewhat larger,more inclusive, more filled with comments on family and his close relationships.
But one, I think, should take this as yet another gift from a writer who has given readers so so much.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Surprising collection of poems, May 10, 2009
This book is a special gift John Updike gave his readers just before he died in January 2009. It comprises the poems he wrote during the last six or seven years of his life, among them his very last poems, some of them written on his deathbed,in the Mass. General Hospital, Boston, deeply moving poems, sad and serene. There are lots of other poems, even funny poems,about all aspects of life, about childhood and family, about sex and sports and nature and travelling. "Endpoint" is - as most the novels Updike wrote during his long and prolific lifetime - a unique celebration of life.
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