Endpoint and Other Poems Book

One of the nice things about the pandemic (I can't believe I just typed that phrase) was that it got me to appreciate poetry again.

With a couple of exceptions, I hadn't picked up a volume of poems and read it all the way through since university, which was, well... a very long time ago.

But something about John Updike's Endpoint - the last book he saw to publication before his death in January 2009 - called out to me from my bulging, overstuffed bookshelves.

I had just read and reviewed Margaret Atwood's Dearly, and found myself completely absorbed by her precise, distilled observations on death and getting older, among other themes.

Plus, something about end-of-the-year stock-taking and the solitary nature of a usually very social time (no travelling or visiting friends or family for me) drew me to Updike's slim book. (Aside: does anyone turn to poetry when they're really happy?)

The eponymous suite of poems that make up the first part of the book drew me in. Here, Updike has included poems penned on some of his last birthdays. The tone is casual yet frank: "Raw days, though spring has been declared. / I settle in, to that decade in which, / I'm told, most people die." That same poem ends like this:

Nature is never bored, and we whose lives
are linearly pinned to these aloof,
self-fascinated cycles can't complain,
though aches and pains and even dreams a-crawl
with wood lice of decay give pause to praise.
Birthday, death day - what day is not both?

One of my favourite poems is "The Author Observes His Birthday, 2005," in which Updike thinks about a life spent producing books, touching on his childhood love of comics and his early reading, then recalling producing his own books ("to have my spines / line up upon the shelf, one more each year, / however out of kilter ran my life! / I drank up women's tears and spat them out / as 10-point Janson, Roman and ital." Stunning.

The later poems in the suite then deal with his final illness, which he recounts with clarity, precision and total unsentimentality. It also makes him reflect on other deaths he's witnessed, and the continuation of nature.

The rest of the book collects late poems on a variety of subjects and themes. He addresses some of his youthful crushes or pastimes: Doris Day, Doo-wop groups, the golfer Payne Stewart. In one of the most memorable poems, "Death of a Computer," he captures an experience we've all had with failing hardware, finding in the rather banal experience something marvellous and mysterious.

In the brilliant "Tools," he begins wittily by asking "how do the manufacturers of tools / turn a profit" and then goes on to describe the various sturdy items in his tool box, comparing them to his aging self: "the tape rule, its inches unaltered though I have shrunk; the carpenter's angle, still absolutely right though I / have strayed." Wow.

He travels. He observes. He finds language to capture - just so - an experience.

I didn't love all of these poems, but perhaps, in time, I will learn to appreciate them before my own endpoint.