Endpoint opens with a series of connected poems which were written on the occasions of Updike’s recent birthdays and culminate in his confrontation with his final illness. They look back on the boy that Updike once was, on his family and little town and the circumstances that fed his love of writing. Then there are ‘Other Poems’, ranging from fanciful musings about what it would be like to be a stolen Rembrandt painting to celebratory outpourings that capture the spontaneity and flux of life. Finally, there is a set of sonnets, some of which are inspired by exotic travels in distant lands, and some of which simply take pleasure in the idiosyncrasies of nature in Updike’s own backyard.
Reviews
The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
“Mr. Updike writes in these stories and poems with the quiet assurance of someone in complete control of his craft. Instead of pushing himself awkwardly into new territory or indulging in creative-writing exercises (as he’s done in earlier tales, where he’s tried to write from the point of view, say, of a suburban iguanodon or a piece of pond scum), he sticks here to what he does best... These two volumes demonstrate ... that his skills in these two genres remained undiminished to the end.”
25/05/2009
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
“In many ways, the poems in Endpoint are more readily enjoyable, being appropriately in his own voice, rightly adroit. When, contemplating a wet spring, he tells us "daffodils grow leggy, like young girls", it's just what we would expect... They deserve to become anthology pieces, to be celebrated.”
19/06/2009
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The Los Angeles Times
John Freeman
“Updike's work has always been autobiographical, but it spoke through an ornate embroidery that was ennobling, however nearly pornographic or repetitive the writing might become. In "Endpoint," that lace has been yanked away and what remains is a true leave-taking that vacillates between horror, valediction and confession.”
07/06/2009
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The Sunday Times
Peter Kemp
“Endpoint ... puts you alongside him with particular intimacy as he moves through his seventies, “that decade in which,/I’m told, most people die”... All of this is done with a mannerly but unillusioned stoicism that makes these works deeply affecting exercises in gracefully cadenced candour.”
05/07/2009
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The Washington Post
Michael Dirda
“In their last years, many artists cast aside all their usual flourishes, dismiss the circus animals and simply set down, as directly as possible, the realities and inevitabilities of old age. So John Updike has done in this moving book of poems.”
23/04/2009
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The New Statesman
Leo Robson
“...he addresses the reader without artifice, though not without art. Some of the poems that form Endpoint were written in hospital beds last December, and the resulting work is, not unexpectedly, mournful, much of it peering towards “that unthinkable future/when I am dead”. Yet the book also contains a number of short observational poems. Indeed, the light-hearted sonnet seems to have been the ideal form for the Updike who was not merely content but eager to put inconsequential thoughts down on paper.”
02/07/2009
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The New York Times
Clive James
“In a single poem [“Bird Caught in My Deer Netting”], he did enough to prove that he not only had the whole tradition of English-language poetry in his head, he had the means to add to it... It’s a wonderful poem, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves. He wrote very few like it, and usually, even on the comparatively rare occasions when he tried to give it everything, he was led toward frivolity by his fatal propensity for reveling in skill. But his very last book, a book of poems, proves that he always had what it took.”
28/04/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Jeremy Noel-Tod
“There is certainly no denying Updike’s ability to digest any occasion vividly and philosophically. But there is also no recalling precise rhythms or profound resonance once the poem is read. For all the admirable contemporaneity of his subject matter, Updike’s approach to poetry as the “highest kind of verbal exercise”, pursued in the interludes of an extraordinary career in prose, reminds one of [Ian] Hamilton’s observation on the forgotten poets of previous centuries: “They were all vicars and that sort of thing. Poetry was just something one did.””
01/06/2009
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Times Literary Supplement
Giles Harvey
“...let's not be sentimental: these two books [Endpoint and My Father's Tears] provide little cause for celebration. To praise them simply because their author died recently would be a misplaced homage: everyone knows he can do better than this. ”
10/07/2009
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