Telephone poles and other poems

the long version

"John Updike's poems are 'what poetry of this sort exactly ought to be - playful but elegant, sharp-eyed, witty' (Phyllis McGinley). some of them, in their humour and verbal jugglery, seem to qualify as 'light verse'; others slip gracefully across the border into the general realm of poetry. No clear cut distinction can be made between the two kinds, because it is less a matter of changes in the poet's mood than of his approach as a whole : he has the sure touch which enables a writer to be gay about grave themes without frivolity. He is consistently concerned with man's cosmic embarrassment, and the same vision illuminates the creatures of 'The High-Hearts' and 'Seagulls'. Science and religion, frequently and variously invoked, frame a single paradox, the paradox of the mundane ; and each poem, whether inspired by an antic headline or a landscape, rejoices in the elusive surface of created things."--Inside jacket flap.