It was always hard not to be secretly a little annoyed at the late John Updike for being . . . well, so good at everything. The famous novels aside, memoir, travel reportage, children’s literature, humor, literary criticism and essays on everything from Renaissance painting to Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams poured from his typewriter.

Despite seven previous collections of verse, dating back to 1958, he was perhaps least known for his poetry. “Endpoint and Other Poems” may change that.

The slender volume, rushed to publication by Updike’s longtime publisher, Knopf, is an accomplished if slightly schizophrenic affair. The title sequence, a series of linked poems written in the months leading up to his January death from cancer, is as measured and poignant as any verse in recent memory.

The language is beautifully cadenced, displaying the same feel for the music of words that made his prose so distinctive and memorable.

Death is “a pin-sized prick of light winked out,” while the poet’s memories “in their jiggled scope collide / to form more sacred windows.” The ugliness of aging, of hospitals and CAT scans and bedside visits is transformed by the rhythms of Updike’s verse and the keenness of his observations. He made even dying sound stylish.

The other sections of the book include charming but basically slight meditations and sonnets on such mundane subjects as television, plane travel, baseball, and, er, a bathroom act that my father still refers to using a basketball metaphor. These are fun, in limited doses.

On a scale of difficulty, with 1 being your average limerick and 10 being “The Faerie Queen,” these poems check in at a friendly 5. Updike’s strong suit as a writer was always the precision of his observations; a line describing the tentative light of early spring as “just trying brightness out” or a “fabled velvet death-black sky / salted with stars” sticks bracingly in the mind.

Some minor objections remain. ” Endpoint” has a cleaning-out-the-drawer feel to it, with the sublime side by side with the silly. The shorter pieces, as amusing as they are, carry a whiff of the self-satisfied cleverness that detractors of The New Yorker magazine claim is the house style.

Traces of Updike’s flaws linger underneath the keen intelligence and virtuoso wordplay. He was a bit of a male chauvinist, to be sure, and his basic stance on life and society was fundamentally reactionary. His attitudes were molded by the 1950s - a decade vividly recalled here in light-handed elegies for Frankie Laine and Doris Day. And while his curiosity never abated, an elderly fussiness peeps around the edges of some of the poems.

All that aside, ” Endpoint” serves as a worthy if faintly anticlimactic coda to a towering career in American literature. As an epigraph to one of the poems, Updike has taken a line from a letter that his editor William Maxwell wrote to him: “Please go on being yourself.”

That he did, right up until the end. We readers are the richer for it.

From The Cleveland Plain Dealer (April 20, 2009)