Chris Wiseman stayed at the Marine Hotel in North Berwick, Scotland, in 2000, about eighteen months after the American novelist John Updike. Wiseman believes he stayed in the same room as that in which Updike is reported to have watched High Society (1956). Here Wiseman collects his best work, alongside a section of new and previously unpublished poetry. Described by Lee Shedden of The Calgary Herald as ‘a testament to a lifetime of dedication to the poet’s craft,’ In John Updike’s Room won the City of Calgary’s W.O. Mitchell Award in 2006.
In In John Updike’s Room, one of Canada’s major poets has gathered the best from his first eight books, and added a generous and richly varied selection of new and previously unpublished work. Christopher Wiseman demonstrates here, with great authority, a strong and impressive humanity, deep feeling, a total command of both free and formal verse, an ability to celebrate the seemingly ordinary and turn it into something unforgettable, even luminous, and a startlingly wide range of subject, tone and approach. The poems collected here from some forty years of writing move around Europe, Britain, Canada and the United States, and range from the comic to the satirical to the reflective to the elegiac, but never lose what the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Donald Justice has called Wiseman’s ‘strong, clear, truth-telling voice’. Don Coles admires the poems for being ‘subtle and tender’, and throughout these warm, human and accessible works, the over-riding quality is one of honest, recognizable, but distinctive emotion, as the poems, brilliantly crafted and shaped, delight and deepen our sense of personal possibility, of the joy, laughter, sorrow and grief which will send the reader back over and over again to its warm and wise pages.