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Selected Poems
Selected Poems
Feb 28, 2026 2:02 AM

Author:John Updike

Selected Poems

A post-humous, autobiographical collection of poetry from John Updike, one of the most celebrated American writers of the twentieth cenury and author of modern classic novel Rabbit, Run

Updike had a boundless capacity for curiosity and delight. This collection of poems from across his career displays his extraordinary range in form and subject: from metaphysical epigrams, and lyrical odes to blank-verse sonnets, on topics from Roman busts to Lucian Freud to postage stamps.

These poems are nimble and inventive, exploring art, science, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, growth, decay and rebirth. Collected in chronological order, from precocious undergraduate efforts to frequently anthologized classics, this is an autobiography in verse for every Updike fan and a celebration of twentieth century American life.

Reviews

The free-wheeling, conversational, frequently didactic tone suits Fuller perfectly, enabling him to comment on art as well as life.

—— John Greening , Times Literary Supplement

A significant presence in British letters

—— Michael Hoffman , The Times

Works so brilliantly.

—— Daily Telegraph

Brookner has a merciless comic gift.

—— Sunday Times

Fans of Sophie Kinsella will love this effervescent story.

—— Sunday Express

Only Emily Brontë exposes her imagination to the dark spirit

—— V. S. Pritchett

Hers...is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts...by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar

—— Virginia Woolf

Commonly thought of as 'romantic', but try rereading it without being astonished by the comfortableness with which Brontë's characters subject one another to extremes of physical and psychological violence

—— Sarah Waters

Lambasted when it came out as irredeemably perverse and, I quote, as practically "French"'

—— A. L. Kennedy

The greatest love story ever told, Heathcliff the hero being a wild, stormy, gothic fellow who will not rest until his beloved Cathy is in his arms again, even though she died some years previously. My favourite moment comes when he bribes the sexton who buried Cathy to bury him next to her, with the sides of their coffins left open, so when they're dug up 50 years hence nobody will know which bones are his, and which are hers

—— Patrick McGrath
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