The reviews have started coming in for John Updike: Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Carduff and published by Alfred A. Knopf (cloth, 320pp., $30). To keep them consolidated we will add new reviews to this page as we become aware of them, so check back. Below is a link to an abridged version of poet Brad Leithauser’s introduction and reviews arranged according to date of publication.
“Updike’s naked poetry.” Brad Leithauser. The New Criterion. October 2015. “To my mind, he was the twentieth-century American writer who created the greatest number of zingers—sentences you want to place check marks beside, and extract from their surroundings to scrutinize as separate entities, and eventually perhaps tinker with, in an attempt to understand better why they perform so well. (In this, he was to the twentieth century what Henry James was to the nineteenth.)”
“Selected Poems establishes Updike as a serious poet.” James Plath. The John Updike Society. 15 October 2015. “Collected and compressed, this volume offers proof that Updike is in fact a gifted poet whose verse should not be ignored. He displays a poetic range that would be impressive even if it had come from an award-winning poet like [Brad] Leithauser.”
“Book Review: Updike compilation of poems evocative.” Peter Tonguette. The Columbus Dispatch. 1 November 2015. “Updike may have been a part-time poet, but this carefully chosen selection shows his facility with the form.
“Boston Boys: The poetry of John Wieners and John Updike.” Dan Chiasson. The New Yorker. 2 November 2015. “Updike’s poems are not trifles; he could be surprisingly formally ambitious, even experimental. The problem is that all of his poems about strain, discomfort, and regret cheer him, and we don’t associate cheer with great poetry. The poems often feel like the by-products of the happy diversion they provided their author while he was writing them. . . . His best poems are mild evocations of local eccentricity, seasonal anomie, domestic frisson.”
“Review: John Updike the poet?” Michael D. Langan. NBC-2. 4 December 2015. “For me, Updike seemed to be able to write a poem about anything. I’d hazard that if he blew on the inside of a window pane during a harsh winter in southeastern Pennsylvania, hurriedly scribbling a few lines with his finger on the frost, a lasting poem would appear.”
“Updike’s Violin.” Jonathan Galassi. The New York Review of Books. 17 December 2015. “You could almost call his early verse ‘applied poetry,’ entertainments written with his left hand, as it were. As time went by, though, he distinguished his light verse from what he later called his ‘secret bliss.’ ‘My poems are my oeuvre’s beloved waifs,’ he wrote in the preface to his 1993 Collected Poems. Lurking in the shadows of Updike’s will to shine is another, more surreptitious aspiration, one he never fully came to terms with.”
“Updike in Verse; Has justice been done to a lifetime of poetry?” Joseph Bottum. The [Weekly Standard] Magazine. 21 December 2015. “No, this is a disappointment. To read the 132 poems chosen by this volume’s editor, Christopher Carduff, is to realize that John Updike is not a poet well served by the popular impulse that reduces a large body of work to a greatest-hits anthology.
“Review: Men of Letters, John Updike and Jim Harrison, and Their Poems.” Dwight Garner. The New York Times. 22 December 2015. “Updike’s best verse is presented now in Selected Poems . . . with a wise introduction by Brad Leithauser. Updike’s gift for close observation, in these poems as elsewhere, is near to supernatural.”
“Staff Picks: The Poetry of John Updike.” Rand Richards Cooper. Commonweal. 23 December 2015. “Like his prose, Updike’s poetry—much of it written in variations on the sonnet—highlights his skill in noticing the world, and his life in it, in trenchant and surprising ways. The poems convey wry humor, exquisite attentiveness to daily life, and an abiding preoccupation with mortality and time.”
“Likely Stories: Selected Poems by John Updike.” Jim McKeown. KWBU (Texas Public Radio). 12 May 2016. “I wish I had an hour or two to read to you aloud more of the words and phrases, the mastery of language so evident in everything Updike wrote. . . . Updike can evoke all those feelings as quickly and lightly as a feather duster, capturing motes of images and emotions. John Updike: Selected Poems is a fantastic place to explore one of the great writers of the 20th century. 5 stars.”