This paperback, Verse, is comprised of two earlier hardcover volumes of poems from John Updike, The Carpentered Hen from Harper & Row and Telephone Poles from Knopf. The poems date from the 1950s and early 1960s, and in the words of Phyllis McGinley, “His is what poetry of this sort ought to be: playful, but elegant, sharp-eyed, witty.”
Here are the beginnings of some of his poems. Some of them are pure wordplay, as in “Player Piano”:
“My stick fingers click with a snicker
And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;
Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker
And pluck from these keys melodies.”
Several of them start with a quote from a newspaper story and then run wild with it, as in “The Descent of Mr. Aldez”:
“Mr. Aldez, a cloud physicist, came down last year to study airborne ice crystals.
– Dispatch from Antarctica in the Times
That cloud–ambiguous, not
a horse, or a whale, but what?–
comes down through the crystalline mist.
It is a physicist!”
And some are meditative, as with “B.W.I.” (the old British West Indies of the 20th century):
“Under a priceless sun,
Shanties and guava.
Beside an emerald sea,
Lumps of lava.
On the white dirt road,
A blind man tapping.
On dark Edwardian sofas,
White men napping.”
A largely enjoyable collection, but not up to the standard of those similar 20th century poets, Phyllis McGinley and Dorothy Parker. But then again, Updike’s many American awards (Pulitzer, National Book Award, etc etc) were for his fiction. His poetry can be considered a remarkable bonus.
Form in Formless Times 