On a blog post from Commonweal‘s Rand Richards Cooper we get “Staff Picks: The Poetry of John Updike.” John Updike: Selected Poems was one of his 2015 favorites.

“A book I’m glad to have read this year. . . . It brings me back to a day thirty years ago, when I took a bus out to Seton Hall University to hear Updike read. In a smallish lecture room he stood behind a lectern and, in a quiet voice adorned with the slightest lisp, he read . . . poems. The audience was surprised and perhaps a bit restive. Turns out Updike had agreed to do the reading only on the condition that it be poetry and not prose,” Cooper writes.

“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.”