In the boldly eclectic title poem of his collection, John Updike employs the meters of Dante,
Spenser, Pope, Whitman, and Pound, as well as the pictographic tactics of concrete poetry,
to take an inventory of his life at the end of his thirty-fifth year—at midpoint. These cantos
form both a joke on the antique genre of the long poem and an attempt to write one: an
earnest meditation on the mysteries of the ego, lost time, and the mundane. The remainder
of the volume is a six years' harvest of light verse and incidental lyrics—poems dealing with …