Telephone Poles and Other Poems

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