In John Updike's Room: New and Selected Poems [Paperback]

`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.'

`His subject-matter is, for the most part, sad in character. A high percentage of the poems are either elegies, or set in churchyards, or commemorate the date. The dead may be relatives, personal friends, film celebrities, revered sports players, or simply victims of the accidents and tragedies of our age. But if the mood is often sobering, the poems themselves are accessible, accomplished, and therefore exhilarating. Wiseman is a master of lacrimae rerum, of the poetry of loss. All his poems bear testimony to a life lived to the full, telling of its joys (sometimes), its sorrows, and its timeless memories. Almost all of them (``Granddaughter, First Meeting'' is a charming, eloquent exception) look back to the past, yet Wiseman displays the ability to write with deep feeling and to convey pathos without falling into a cloying sentimentality.'

`This is timeless writing with no hint of pretentiousness. Intensely human, about ``ordinary life,'' it can be appreciated and cherished even by those who feel nervous when confronted with ``the poetic''.'

`It's this alternating tone, this multifaceted ability, that does a rare thing: the poems actually play off of one another. Too often I read poem after poem in collection after collection wherein no thought is paid to juxtaposition. Wiseman has this trick down cold. His poems can be menacing, they can be tender, they can be comic, they can be serious. Theme ricochets off of theme; and I suppose this effect must have been amplified in the individual collections themselves for it to be preserved in a Selected. Each of the poems, though, are similar in one respect: they take a premise -- be it the washer and dryer being lovers, be it the Dracula legend -- and expound upon it. They use their premises as a launching ground for insight. Often small insight -- Wiseman isn't a master of leaping logic, of transcendence -- that's perfectly suited to the little moments he creates in his poems, little vignettes.'

`More than any other Canadian poet I've read in recent years, Christopher Wiseman has written poetry that, as Philip Larkin believed, should ``try to move towards the reader.'' The poems in In John Updike's Room reach the reader using an exciting plain-style -- clear, stylish, colloquial, and capable of the most exquisite, unhurried, delicately-expressed insights. By keeping alive the English language as a force both accessible and bold, approachable and freshly-imagined, Wiseman makes good on a promise only the finest poets are able to satisfy: he has created an individual music that can be genuinely shared.'