In John Updike's Room: New and Selected Poems

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Christopher Wiseman has been writing and publishing poetry for well over
30 years. His name will be known to those widely read in contemporary
Canadian poetry, though it is certainly not a household word. But In
John Updike’s Room should, if there is any justice in the literary
world, set him firmly among the major poets writing in this country at
present.

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 dead. 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.

He is a deeply traditional poet—the final poem, uncharacteristic but
powerful, is a bitter squib directed at those who, in recent decades,
have betrayed the element of joyous pleasure from literary study and
replaced it with a dreary academicism. In contrast, Wiseman avoids the
experimental, relying on conventional forms and sanctioned technique.
Above all, he has a gift for the simple and unforgettable. How better to
begin a poem of mourning than with “Now I’ve lost whatever words I
need”? Or to end another than with “... The land is deep / With the
calling dead. I know. I’ve passed among them”?

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.”