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gooberintheclub's review
4.0
The first section of this book is poems in chronological order leading up to his death. These poems are profound, emotional, and meditative. The second (and longer) section is good stuff. The first section is truly special. I think I will be returning to it for many years to come.
elianachow's review
A poet who has mastered the music of poetry, those lilting hops between words and sentences, even if the content of this particular collection often devolved into frowns and oddities. “Endpoint,” the first series of poems, is stunning.
xterminal's review
4.0
John Updike, Endpoint (Knopf, 2009)
The first John Updike book I read was Midpoint, his 1969 collection of poetry, published when he was thirty-seven. I was going to try and make some sort of inane comparison with Endpoint, Updike's final book, published posthumously, but I figure that fact that Midpoint actually ended up almost being an exact midpoint makes any point I was going to make there far more elegantly than I would have. And while Updike's poetry has gotten a great deal more conservative over the years (I know a magazine editor or two who use the sonnets in Midpoint as examples of how avant-garde formal poetry can be they'll accept for publication), Updike to the end never lost an ounce of his sense of the wonders inherent in the English language, and how to shape those wonders into something ineffable (Campbell McGrath, at a posthumous reading of the book, said Updike's use of language is comparable to sound effects in a film; indeed):
“Today, the author hits three score thirteen,
an age his father, woken in the night
by pressure on his heart, fell short of. Still,
I scribble on. My right hand occupies
the center of my vision, faithful old
five-fingered beast of burden, dappled with
some psoriatic spots I used to hate...”
(--”The Author Observes His Birthday, 2005”)
You can take it as a whole and probably miss some stuff, but if you want to isolate something, just read through that slowly, emphasizing the s sounds, and then pause and consider the landscape Updike has created in that short section. It's hilly, gently so, and windswept, and has a few tufts of dead grass here and there but is otherwise barren—and endlessly fascinating. I ended up liking this just as much as I did Midpoint, which was quite a pleasant surprise given the relentlessly autobiographical nature of much of the material here. Highly recommended. ****
The first John Updike book I read was Midpoint, his 1969 collection of poetry, published when he was thirty-seven. I was going to try and make some sort of inane comparison with Endpoint, Updike's final book, published posthumously, but I figure that fact that Midpoint actually ended up almost being an exact midpoint makes any point I was going to make there far more elegantly than I would have. And while Updike's poetry has gotten a great deal more conservative over the years (I know a magazine editor or two who use the sonnets in Midpoint as examples of how avant-garde formal poetry can be they'll accept for publication), Updike to the end never lost an ounce of his sense of the wonders inherent in the English language, and how to shape those wonders into something ineffable (Campbell McGrath, at a posthumous reading of the book, said Updike's use of language is comparable to sound effects in a film; indeed):
“Today, the author hits three score thirteen,
an age his father, woken in the night
by pressure on his heart, fell short of. Still,
I scribble on. My right hand occupies
the center of my vision, faithful old
five-fingered beast of burden, dappled with
some psoriatic spots I used to hate...”
(--”The Author Observes His Birthday, 2005”)
You can take it as a whole and probably miss some stuff, but if you want to isolate something, just read through that slowly, emphasizing the s sounds, and then pause and consider the landscape Updike has created in that short section. It's hilly, gently so, and windswept, and has a few tufts of dead grass here and there but is otherwise barren—and endlessly fascinating. I ended up liking this just as much as I did Midpoint, which was quite a pleasant surprise given the relentlessly autobiographical nature of much of the material here. Highly recommended. ****