“Herman has taken to writing poetry,” Melville’s wife wrote to her mother in 1859. “You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.” To this day, the name of poet in America, unlike the name of novelist, has proved at times a dangerous liability. Yet John Updike has never fully accepted the security of his reputation as a writer of fiction. With The Carpentered Hen of 1958, he began his writing career as a light versifier. Over a span of forty years he has printed 135 poems in The New Yorker and scores elsewhere; he has produced four further collections of poetry and, at last, this omnium gathering.

Now, with an air of apology—the poems are “my oeuvre’s beloved waifs”—Updike assembles all that he would keep. Few published waifs have been omitted; for the curious, a list of them appears at the back of the book. Updike divides his book in two: the poetry up front for the main repast, and a hundred-page creampuff of light verse.

Critics and prize-givers have never much cottoned to Updike’s verse.

Critics and prize-givers have never much cottoned to Updike’s verse. For all its bulk and all his fame, it has virtually escaped notice in little magazines and academic quarterlies. Only one Updike poem appears regularly in anthologies: “Ex-Basketball Player,” a favorite in college literature textbooks because every student knows some pathetic old high-school athlete, his glory finished, still ghosting about town. A few years ago