'Endpoint' brave and pristine

ENDPOINT AND OTHER POEMS. By John Updike. Knopf. 97 pages. $25.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in "Self-Reliance": "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

John Updike's genius always was couched, just this way, in majestic familiarity. How flattering to see our own lives through the filter of his eye and mind. One has the sense that nothing is lost or squandered in Updike. The man who is shocked to meet his own reflection ("After a Tucson movie, some man in/the men's room mirror lunged toward me/with wild small eyes, white hair and wattled neck — /Who could that be so hostile and so weird, so due for disposal") is also the panicked child who lost his mother's hand in a department store more than 70 years before.

Updike has never forgotten what it is to be a piece of nature. "Endpoint," the collection of poems he assembled in the last weeks of his life, scouts out the frontiers of age and death. These are beautiful, unflinching poems that walk the line between stoicism and sentiment.

As early as "Pigeon Feathers," from his first story collection, Updike introduced the crisis of mortality. In that story, a 13-year-old boy foresees his own extinction before consoling himself with the thought that a God who could lavish craftmanship on a bunch of "worthless birds" (pigeons) surely would let him live forever.

The stakes are higher in the poems of "Endpoint." Updike says in "Spirit of 76," one of the birthday poems that make up the book's opening sequence (also titled "Endpoint"): "I see clear through to the ultimate page,/the silence I dared break for my small time." Like Rabbit Angstrom, who tells his son, Nelson, that dying "isn't so bad," Updike is reassuring. The lovely "Creeper" offers this benediction: "... to live is good/but not to live — to be pulled down/with scarce a ripping sound,/still flourishing, still/stretching toward the sun— /is also good."

The faltering, temporary self, the sturdy world and the faith to negotiate the distance between the two, this is Updike's literary territory. He has chosen to tell the truth about everything from golf to adultery. Now it's colonoscopies and metastases. Updike's words are pristine, brave. His volume will fill the "book-shaped hole" that awaits it, as he says, among the other spines on his shelf. Perhaps Rabbit's dying thoughts, the final words of the tetralogy, apply here: "Maybe. Enough."