Alfred A. Knopf. 112 pp. $25

The thank-you to Shillington he wrote that day, "Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth," reveals the heartbreakingly meditative essence of Endpoint, the recently published posthumous poetry collection that was, as far as we know, the conclusion to Updike's spectacularly prolific career.

To think of you brings tears less caustic

than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps

we meet our heaven at the start and not

the end of life. Even then were tears

and fear and struggle, but the town itself

draped in plain glory the passing days.

That last line encapsulated Updike's life of letters as well as anything he or his critics ever wrote. With a nearly unparalleled facility for language and a piercing eye, he ennobled the humble landscape of what, despite all his honors and success, was a simple life - the small-town boy, the suburban father and husband, the homebound artist who chose grit over glitz.

In much of Endpoint, in the reflections on existence and its end, as well as in the light verse that follows, we get more of those brilliant Updikean takes on the mundane - birthdays and birds, currency and cacti, baseball and golf, even two of young Updike's early favorites, Frankie Laine and Doris Day.

Only in its 20 sonnets does his gaze fall upon poetry's more classical grist - Helen of Troy, a concert at Sainte-Chapelle, exotic Cambodia and India - and they, frankly, make up its least appealing segment.

Updike, whose first book, 1958's The Carpentered Hen, was also a collection of poems, seemed to see poetry as a literary change-up, an unwinding from the daily churn of fiction.

While his light verse was frequently charming and his longer poems thought-provoking and crafty, one always sensed that his poetry was more pastime than profession.

But because of the author's end-of-life awareness, Endpoint is different. The best of its poems are infused with a heft lacking in Updike's earlier work.

The sequence of surprisingly straightforward - and apparently chronological - poems that open Endpoint, and also give it its title, become a poignantly powerful diary.

They offer a glimpse inside the head and soul of Updike as, at first in a series of annual birthday poems, he moves from a cynical dismay about aging ("Birthday, death day - what day is not both?") to a gradual acceptance of death ("I had not hoped to find, in this bright place, so solvent a peace").

In "3/18/03," a title that matched his 71st birthday, Updike appears overtaken by foreboding as he gazes through the window of his Massachusetts home.