Author: John Updike
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307961958
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 100
Book Description
An acclaimed collection of poetry from one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, the author of the Rabbit series. As a present to John Updike on his fiftieth birthday, and as a treat for his readers, his first book, a collection of light verse originally published twenty-five years ago, was brought back into print, with an author’s foreword and some small revisions. Many of these poems were written when the author was a young art student in England and a “Talk of the Town” reporter for The New Yorker, which published over forty of them. They deal with the quiddities of things, the oddities of science, quirks of American life (especially as reported in Life magazine during those smiling Eisenhower years), and moments of epiphany in literature and nature. A number—“Ex-Basketball Player,” “Superman,” “Mirror,” “Quilt”—have been frequently reprinted in anthologies. All show a sharp ear, a fond eye, and an active though not always light-hearted fancy. Written mainly to amuse, Updike’s early verse was also, as his foreword states, “a way of dealing with the universe, an exercise of the Word.” Admirers who know him mostly through his fiction should be delighted to encounter what he calls “these old evidences of my own high spirits.” The Carpentered Hen, in recent years a hard-to-get collector’s item, now again. unhinges her wings, abandons her nest of splinter, and sings.
The Carpentered Hen
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307961958
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 100
Book Description
An acclaimed collection of poetry from one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, the author of the Rabbit series. As a present to John Updike on his fiftieth birthday, and as a treat for his readers, his first book, a collection of light verse originally published twenty-five years ago, was brought back into print, with an author’s foreword and some small revisions. Many of these poems were written when the author was a young art student in England and a “Talk of the Town” reporter for The New Yorker, which published over forty of them. They deal with the quiddities of things, the oddities of science, quirks of American life (especially as reported in Life magazine during those smiling Eisenhower years), and moments of epiphany in literature and nature. A number—“Ex-Basketball Player,” “Superman,” “Mirror,” “Quilt”—have been frequently reprinted in anthologies. All show a sharp ear, a fond eye, and an active though not always light-hearted fancy. Written mainly to amuse, Updike’s early verse was also, as his foreword states, “a way of dealing with the universe, an exercise of the Word.” Admirers who know him mostly through his fiction should be delighted to encounter what he calls “these old evidences of my own high spirits.” The Carpentered Hen, in recent years a hard-to-get collector’s item, now again. unhinges her wings, abandons her nest of splinter, and sings.
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307961958
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 100
Book Description
An acclaimed collection of poetry from one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, the author of the Rabbit series. As a present to John Updike on his fiftieth birthday, and as a treat for his readers, his first book, a collection of light verse originally published twenty-five years ago, was brought back into print, with an author’s foreword and some small revisions. Many of these poems were written when the author was a young art student in England and a “Talk of the Town” reporter for The New Yorker, which published over forty of them. They deal with the quiddities of things, the oddities of science, quirks of American life (especially as reported in Life magazine during those smiling Eisenhower years), and moments of epiphany in literature and nature. A number—“Ex-Basketball Player,” “Superman,” “Mirror,” “Quilt”—have been frequently reprinted in anthologies. All show a sharp ear, a fond eye, and an active though not always light-hearted fancy. Written mainly to amuse, Updike’s early verse was also, as his foreword states, “a way of dealing with the universe, an exercise of the Word.” Admirers who know him mostly through his fiction should be delighted to encounter what he calls “these old evidences of my own high spirits.” The Carpentered Hen, in recent years a hard-to-get collector’s item, now again. unhinges her wings, abandons her nest of splinter, and sings.
The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 122
Book Description
Witty verse, mainly from "The New Yorker."
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 122
Book Description
Witty verse, mainly from "The New Yorker."
Telephone Poles and Other Poems
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307961966
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 95
Book Description
This second collection of John Updike's poetry is equally divided between poems that, in their verbal jugglery and humorous bias, seem to qualify as “light” and poems that, one way or other, cross the problematic border into the general realm of poetry. The distinction cannot be clear-cut. The poet is consistently concerned with Man’s cosmic embarrassment, and the same vision illuminates the creatures of “The High Hearts” and “Seagulls.” Science and religion, so frequently and variously invoked, frame a single paradox, the paradox of the mundane; and each poem, whether inspired by an antic headline or a suburban landscape, rejoices in the elusive surface of created things. When The Carpentered Hen, John Updike’s first collection of verse, was published, Phyllis McGinley wrote: “I have been happily reading Mr. Updike in The New Yorker for some time and am happy, now, to own him collected. When he first appeared in that magazine, I was so elated to see a new name in light verse that I felt like crying with the Ancient Mariner ‘A Sail, A Sail!’ His is what poetry of this sort exactly out to be—playful but elegant, sharp-eyed, witty.” In the Saturday Review, David McCord wrote: “Furthermore, he is a graceful border-crosser (light verse to poem) as Auden has been; as Betjeman and McGinley frequently are.”
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307961966
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 95
Book Description
This second collection of John Updike's poetry is equally divided between poems that, in their verbal jugglery and humorous bias, seem to qualify as “light” and poems that, one way or other, cross the problematic border into the general realm of poetry. The distinction cannot be clear-cut. The poet is consistently concerned with Man’s cosmic embarrassment, and the same vision illuminates the creatures of “The High Hearts” and “Seagulls.” Science and religion, so frequently and variously invoked, frame a single paradox, the paradox of the mundane; and each poem, whether inspired by an antic headline or a suburban landscape, rejoices in the elusive surface of created things. When The Carpentered Hen, John Updike’s first collection of verse, was published, Phyllis McGinley wrote: “I have been happily reading Mr. Updike in The New Yorker for some time and am happy, now, to own him collected. When he first appeared in that magazine, I was so elated to see a new name in light verse that I felt like crying with the Ancient Mariner ‘A Sail, A Sail!’ His is what poetry of this sort exactly out to be—playful but elegant, sharp-eyed, witty.” In the Saturday Review, David McCord wrote: “Furthermore, he is a graceful border-crosser (light verse to poem) as Auden has been; as Betjeman and McGinley frequently are.”
European Perspectives on John Updike
Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
From his first book publication in 1958, the American writer John Updike attracted an international readership. His books have been translated into twenty-three languages, and he has always had a strong following in the United Kingdom and in Europe. Although Updike died in 2009, interest in his work remains strong among European scholars. No recent volume, however, collects diverse European views on Updike's oeuvre. The current book fills that void, presenting essays that perceive Updike's renditions of America through the eyes of scholar/readers from both Western and Eastern Europe--back cover.
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
From his first book publication in 1958, the American writer John Updike attracted an international readership. His books have been translated into twenty-three languages, and he has always had a strong following in the United Kingdom and in Europe. Although Updike died in 2009, interest in his work remains strong among European scholars. No recent volume, however, collects diverse European views on Updike's oeuvre. The current book fills that void, presenting essays that perceive Updike's renditions of America through the eyes of scholar/readers from both Western and Eastern Europe--back cover.
Selected Poems of John Updike
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101875305
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
Now in paperback: five decades of witty, intimate, and moving poems--written between 1953 and 2008--with the cumulative force of an autobiography in verse, by this master of American letters. Though John Updike is widely known as one of America's greatest writers of prose, both his first book and his last were poetry collections, and in the fifty years between he published six other volumes of verse. Here, Christopher Carduff has selected the best of his lifework in poetry: 129 of his most significant and accomplished poems, from precocious undergraduate efforts to frequently anthologized midcareer classics to dozens of later works in a form that Updike made his own, the blank-verse sonnet. Art, science, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, and the beauty of the man-made and God-given worlds--these recurring topics provided Updike ever-surprising occasions for wonder and matchless verbal invention. His Selected Poems is, as Brad Leithauser writes in his introduction, a celebration of American life in the second half of the twentieth century: "No other writer of his time captured so much of this passing pageant. That he did so with brio and delight and nimbleness is another reason to celebrate our noble celebrant."
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101875305
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
Now in paperback: five decades of witty, intimate, and moving poems--written between 1953 and 2008--with the cumulative force of an autobiography in verse, by this master of American letters. Though John Updike is widely known as one of America's greatest writers of prose, both his first book and his last were poetry collections, and in the fifty years between he published six other volumes of verse. Here, Christopher Carduff has selected the best of his lifework in poetry: 129 of his most significant and accomplished poems, from precocious undergraduate efforts to frequently anthologized midcareer classics to dozens of later works in a form that Updike made his own, the blank-verse sonnet. Art, science, popular culture, foreign travel, erotic love, and the beauty of the man-made and God-given worlds--these recurring topics provided Updike ever-surprising occasions for wonder and matchless verbal invention. His Selected Poems is, as Brad Leithauser writes in his introduction, a celebration of American life in the second half of the twentieth century: "No other writer of his time captured so much of this passing pageant. That he did so with brio and delight and nimbleness is another reason to celebrate our noble celebrant."
The Carpenter
John Updike's Human Comedy
Author: Brian Keener
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820470900
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164
Book Description
The comedy in John Updike's most important works - The Centaur; Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and Rabbit Remembered - defines a comic world and its morality. Although critics have failed to recognize the extent and the importance of Updike's comedy, his serious fiction does contain a good deal of farce, burlesque, and irony that, far from being peripheral or mere comic relief, depicts the absurd and contradictory nature of life. Within such a world, set in the everyday Pennsylvania of the second half of the twentieth century, human beings mature, or gain Kierkegaard's ethical sphere, by fulfilling their societal and generational responsibilities. George Caldwell of The Centaur is Updike's paragon, while Rabbit Angstrom embodies the comic hero who, through trial and error, finally matures. Overall, through an analysis of Updike's comedy, this book reveals a dimension of his fiction that is essential to understanding his work.
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820470900
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164
Book Description
The comedy in John Updike's most important works - The Centaur; Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and Rabbit Remembered - defines a comic world and its morality. Although critics have failed to recognize the extent and the importance of Updike's comedy, his serious fiction does contain a good deal of farce, burlesque, and irony that, far from being peripheral or mere comic relief, depicts the absurd and contradictory nature of life. Within such a world, set in the everyday Pennsylvania of the second half of the twentieth century, human beings mature, or gain Kierkegaard's ethical sphere, by fulfilling their societal and generational responsibilities. George Caldwell of The Centaur is Updike's paragon, while Rabbit Angstrom embodies the comic hero who, through trial and error, finally matures. Overall, through an analysis of Updike's comedy, this book reveals a dimension of his fiction that is essential to understanding his work.
More Matter
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030748839X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 929
Book Description
In this collection of nonfiction pieces, John Updike gathers his responses to nearly two hundred invitations into print, each “an opportunity to make something beautiful, to find within oneself a treasure that would otherwise remain buried.” Introductions, reviews, and humorous essays, paragraphs on New York, religion, and lust—here is “more matter” commissioned by an age that, as the author remarks in his Preface, calls for “real stuff . . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030748839X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 929
Book Description
In this collection of nonfiction pieces, John Updike gathers his responses to nearly two hundred invitations into print, each “an opportunity to make something beautiful, to find within oneself a treasure that would otherwise remain buried.” Introductions, reviews, and humorous essays, paragraphs on New York, religion, and lust—here is “more matter” commissioned by an age that, as the author remarks in his Preface, calls for “real stuff . . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”
Brazil
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645896
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
In the dream-Brazil of John Updike’s imagining, almost anything is possible if you are young and in love. When Tristão Raposo, a black nineteen-year-old from the Rio slums, and Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, meet on Copacabana Beach, their flight from family and into marriage takes them to the farthest reaches of Brazil’s phantasmagoric western frontier. Privation, violence, captivity, and reversals of fortune afflict them, yet this latter-day Tristan and Iseult cling to the faith that each is the other’s fate for life. Spanning twenty-two years, from the sixties through the eighties, Brazil surprises with its celebration of passion, loyalty, romance, and New World innocence.
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645896
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
In the dream-Brazil of John Updike’s imagining, almost anything is possible if you are young and in love. When Tristão Raposo, a black nineteen-year-old from the Rio slums, and Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, meet on Copacabana Beach, their flight from family and into marriage takes them to the farthest reaches of Brazil’s phantasmagoric western frontier. Privation, violence, captivity, and reversals of fortune afflict them, yet this latter-day Tristan and Iseult cling to the faith that each is the other’s fate for life. Spanning twenty-two years, from the sixties through the eighties, Brazil surprises with its celebration of passion, loyalty, romance, and New World innocence.
Golf Dreams
Author: John Updike
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307784126
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
John Updike wrote about the lure of golf for five decades, from the first time he teed off at the age of twenty-five until his final rounds at the age of seventy-six. Golf Dreams collects the most memorable of his golf pieces, high-spirited evidence of his learning, playing, and living for the game. The camaraderie of golf, the perils of its present boom, how to relate to caddies, and how to manage short putts are among the topics he addresses, sometimes in lyrical essays, sometimes in light verse, sometimes in wickedly comic fiction. All thirty pieces have the lilt of a love song, and the crispness of a firm chip stiff to the pin.
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307784126
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
John Updike wrote about the lure of golf for five decades, from the first time he teed off at the age of twenty-five until his final rounds at the age of seventy-six. Golf Dreams collects the most memorable of his golf pieces, high-spirited evidence of his learning, playing, and living for the game. The camaraderie of golf, the perils of its present boom, how to relate to caddies, and how to manage short putts are among the topics he addresses, sometimes in lyrical essays, sometimes in light verse, sometimes in wickedly comic fiction. All thirty pieces have the lilt of a love song, and the crispness of a firm chip stiff to the pin.