“Endpoint and Other Poems” by John Updike (Alfred A. Knopf, $25)

When he died in January at age 76, John Updike was rightly honored as one of our most gifted fiction writers. Hardly mentioned, however, was his long avocation as a poet. He published several collections of verse, and his latest, “Endpoint and Other Poems,” features more than 50 poems — all written in the past seven years.

Updike’s poetry is often dismissed as “light verse.” Yet, with “Endpoint,” he proves capable of ruminative melancholy as well. In a poem written on his birthday in 2002, he reflects, “Wife absent for a day or two, I wake/alone and older, the storm that aged me/distilled to a skin of reminiscent snow,/so thin a blanket blades of grass show through.”

Considering the effects of “sun damage” late in life, he notes that “the skin does not forget:/Crane Beach, the Caribbean, hoeing shirtless/the Pennsylvania bean-rows. Cells remember/ and wrinkle, pucker, draw up in a knot.”

There are celebratory poems devoted to passions he wrote about extensively in his prose: baseball, golf, art, sex. These last poems are tender, nostalgic but never sentimental. With his perspicacity, great wit and eloquent voice, Updike made writing, whatever the genre, seem easy.