This new collection
of Updike’s poetry caught me by surprise, because he has so many
collections. This version, edited by
Christopher Carduff, also has an introduction by Brad Leithauser. While I never tire of reading Updike, this
collection of poems has revealed many I had forgotten. Unfortunately, my favorite – and his first
published work in The New Yorker –
“Duet with Muffled Brake Drums” – is not in John
Updike: Selected Poems. One cannot
have everything.
I wish I had an hour
to read aloud the words and phrases, the mastery of language so evident in
everything Updike wrote. His use of
simile and metaphor almost always surprised and delighted this reader. I visited his grandmother’s farm, and met his
mother one day as she fed her chickens in the yard. I drove past his childhood home, where he
lived until John and his parents moved back to the farm. This poem describes the home in Shillington,
Pennsylvania, just outside Reading.
Updike wrote, “The
vacant lots are occupied, the woods / Diminish, Slate Hill sinks beneath its crown
/ Of solvent homes, and marketable goods / On all sides crowd the good
remembered town. // Returning, we find our snapshots inexact. / Perhaps a
condition of being alive / Is that the clothes which, setting out, we packed /
With love no longer fit when we arrive. // Yet sights that limited our truth
were strange / To older eyes; the town that we have lost / Is being found by
hands that still arrange / Horse-chestnut heaps and fingerpaint on frost. //
Time shades these alleys; every pavement crack / Is mapped somewhere. A solemn concrete ball, / On the gatepost of
a sold house, brings back / A waist leaning against a buckling wall. // The
gutter-fires smoke, their burning done / Except for fanned within, an orange feather;
/ We have one home, the first, and leave that one. / The having and the leaving
go on together” (9).
Another of my
favorites is “Dogs Death.” “She must
have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car. / Too young to know much, she was
beginning to learn / To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor / And to
win, wetting there, the words, ‘Good dog!
Good dog!’ / We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction. / The
autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver. / As we teased her with play, blood
was filling her skin / And her heart was learning to lie down forever. //
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed / And sent to school, she
crawled beneath the youngest’s bed. / We found her twisted and limp but still
alive. / In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried // To bite my hand an
died. I stroked her warm fur / And my
wife called in a voice imperious with tears. / Though surrounded by love that
would have upheld her, / Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared. //
Back home, we found that in the night her frame, / Drawing near to dissolution,
had endured the shame / Of diarrhea and had dragged across the floor / To a
newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.: (31). I lost a beloved pet in almost identical
circumstances, and this poem brought back all that pain, and sorrow, and
tears. As my mentor once said to me, “No
crying in the writing -- no crying in the reading.”
Updike can evoke all
those feelings as quickly and lightly as a feather duster, capturing motes of
images and emotions. John Updike: Selected Poems is a
fantastic place to begin to explore one of the great writers of the 20th
century. 5 stars. --Chiron, 3/26/16
No comments:
Post a Comment