Endpoint and Other Poems

‘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