Facing Nature

By John Updike

John Updike’s fifth collection of poetry faces nature on a number of levels.  An opening section of sonnets touches upon death, aging, and, in a sequence of describing a week in Spain, insomnia and dread.  The poems that follow consider nature in the form of seasons, of planting trees and being buried, of shadow and rain, of pain and accumulation, and of such human diversions as art and travel.  The last poem here, and the longest in the book, undertakes a walking tour of each of Jupiter’s four major moons, a scientific excursion that leads into the extravagant precisions of the “Seven Odes to Seven Natural Processes,” a lyrical yet literal-minded celebration of some of the earthly forces that uphold and surround us.  Finally, a dozen examples of light verse toy with such natural phenomena as presbyopia, the energy crunch, food, and sex.  Like the best of the metaphysical poets, Mr. Updike embraces the world in all its forms and creates conceits out of the casual as well as the moments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307961945

John Updike

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.