Updike’s Final Verse Confronts His Coming Death

“‘Endpoint and Other Poems’ is, apparently, the last book that John Updike saw through the press before his death this past January. In these pages he writes with devastating plainness about illness and old age…. If L.E. Sissman, whose witty and civilized poetry Updike admired, hadn’t already taken the title, this slender book could easily have been called: ‘Dying: An Introduction.'”