The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures

Updike remarked in an interview collected by the Poetry Foundation that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form.

"[1] The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike was such a well-known novelist, his poetry "could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of "epigrammatical lucidity.

[1] The collection's seventh poem, "Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked," is carved in full on the reverse side of the writer's gravestone.

But we, the enlightened, know in point of fact it's what remains of the flight of a marvellous crow no one saw: Each pole, a caw."

This volume and its follow-up, Telephone Poles, was republished in a single-volume edition titled Verses.