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.
Of course, there was a time when critics claimed that Updike wasn’t much of a poet at all, his poems dismissed as the effluence of a literary talent that properly manifested itself only in the prose of his novels and short stories. Updike himself once described his verse as his “oeuvre’s beloved waifs,” and X. J. Kennedy explained that the novelist writing poetry was “like some designer of Explorer rockets who hasn’t enough to do, in his spare time touching off displays of Roman candles.”
Those days are gone, for the most part. It’s hard to find a critic willing anymore to wave off Updike’s poetic work. The man was a major literary figure, after all, who worked for more than 50 years at his poetic craft. The first book he published, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), was poetry, as was his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009). In all, he wrote 8 collections of verse—to go along with his 21 novels, 4 children’s books, 18 short story collections, and 12 nonfiction books. (Was there ever a more productive writer working at his level?)
The turning point in the critical reception of Updike’s poetry seems to have come with the publication of his Collected Poems in 1993. At that point, he had six full volumes of poetry—both his more seriously toned work and his light verse—and the bulk of it proved too much to ignore. The key word there is bulk. In Selected Poems, Carduff had not only the Collected Poems to work with, but also the two subsequent volumes of poetry Updike wrote before his death in 2009.
Carduff’s selections are not unreasonable. The better-known, sometimes-anthologized poems are all here: “Ex-Basketball Player,” “Telephone Poles,” “Hoeing,” “Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children.” And he covers the breadth of Updike’s career, from the fascinated observer of the world in The Carpentered Hen through the self-conscious author of Endpoint, all too aware of his rapidly descending death.
What’s wrong with Selected Poems is the project itself. In his Collected Poems, Updike sharply distinguished what he called his “light verse” from what he called his “poems,” and Carduff honors the distinction by excluding from this selections all of Updike’s light verse, together with the poet’s “verse for children, poems in translation, found poems, and lines written for family birthdays.” Carduff’s task was undoubtedly made easier by a principle that refuses even to consider a considerable body of work, but it proves a mistake: Updike was often at his best—as both a craftsman and a lively, interesting intellect—in his light and comic verse.
Even within the confines of what the author designated as “real poems,” a selection hides the best effect of his work. As a poet, Updike was a singles hitter. He was the Rod Carew of verse, not the Dave Kingman. Video highlights of their baseball careers would make Kingman look better than he was (all those towering home runs—but edited out, all the accompanying strikeouts). And it would make Carew look far worse than he was (boring base hit after boring base hit, unable to convey that at the end of the season he would lead the league). Even without his light verse, we need Updike whole to appreciate what his poetry achieves.
Partly that’s because of the wry, quiet voice that hides from the reader even the cleverness of its sometimes startlingly brilliant sound effects. Gavin Ewart once wrote that Updike’s poetic talent lay in his power “to make the ordinary seem strange,” and the reader can appreciate Ewart’s point just from the titles of such Updike poems as “Replacing Sash Cords” and “The Beautiful Bowel Movement.”
And yet, even more than making the ordinary world seem strange, Updike has a curious power, when his poetry is read as a whole, to make language itself feel peculiar and out of kilter. The sheer ordinariness of his diction, phrasings, and rhythms masks the extraordinary weirdness of words that his poetry contains. In one of his many poems about golf, he laughs at the play of golfing words: When winter’s glaze is lifted from the greens, / And cups are freshly cut, and birdies sing. In the careful sentimentality of “Dog’s Death,” he makes the final words of an ordinary phrase, Good dog, an almost unbearable plaint. And in “Requiem,” one of his final poems, he backs away from death in irony—only to have the language itself smash back at him:
Are any of these poems from John Updike inescapable monuments, towering in the art of English verse—permanent hits permanently playing on the oldies stations of freshman poetry anthologies? Probably not. Even a poem as good as, say, “Seven Stanzas at Easter” is more a triple than a home run. But put together a career with enough triples, plenty of doubles, and a whole lot of singles, and you have a life’s work that looms in the imagination, larger and better the more that readers come to know it.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
