Endpoint and Other Poems

Description

'Urbane, worldly and robustly sane, the late Updike's poetry bears comparison with writers such as Auden, James Merrill and Seamus Heaney' Daily Mail John Updike was always as much a poet as a storyteller and the poems in this, his final collection, celebrate the everyday, even as they address his own imminent mortality. It is in the connected series of poems, Endpoint, written on his last few birthdays and culminating with the illness that killed him that Updike's work is at its most touching and poignant. 'The poems celebrate everything and anything, no matter how out of the way- earthworms, telegraph poles, milkshakes, baseball . . . they float freely between the ridiculous and sublime. . . coupled with an exhilaratingly exact descriptive precision' Mail on Sunday 'There's no denying Updike's ability to digest any occasion vividly and philosophically' Daily Telegraph 'Superbly skilful, effortlessly able to delineate the sweep of a lifetime in a few pages' Evening Standard

John Updike was born in 1932, in hillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.