Description:
Time's circle draws us in', Christopher Wiseman writes in one of his finest poems, and it's the continuous, poem after poem, vivid and tender evocation of Time that gives this collection its cachet, its utterly distinctive and, as the pages turn, increasingly obvious stand-alone quality. This is a voice which cares not how nakedly and vulnerably it speaks its truths: the brittle safety-first impersonality of post-modernism is kept far hence, like Eliot's dog; if we will only enter into these finely-crafted poems with half the longing that they so richly have for remembered bliss, for the faint persistent music' (from the same Wiseman poem) of our own lives and the lives of those we have known or admired or even, and not seldom here, adored -- sporting heroes, dance-hall tunes, film beauties, early and also late loves -- then, ah then, we'll know we've been allowed into an emotion-laden space that's wider and deeper and, for sure, less predictable than what the fashions of the age have trained us to expect, to endure, to put up with.'
Review Quotes: 'By turns funny, elegiac, wry and tender, In John Updike's Room stands as a testament to a lifetime of dedication to the poet's craft, a book anyone could be proud to submit to posterity.'