When Updike publishes a novel or a collection of tales, most major journals and many general readers respond.

Such is not the case with his poetry. Only literary specialists know that Updike's first book is a volume of poems, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), and that it is the first of, at this writing, his four poetry collections. The dust jacket blurb announces that the volume "charts a nice course between playfulness and sobriety." The book does just that. An antic mood prevails as Updike expresses his observations in a tone bouncing back and forth between tenderness and wit. A collection of fifty-five poems on topics ranging from basketball to the humanities to instructions for a son, The Carpentered Hen begins with an epigraph from Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy:

When she [Philosophy] saw that the Muses of poetry were present by my couch giving words...