Great Regulars: It makes sense that [John] Updike,

who spent his career translating everything into language, would not back away from writing about dying. It also makes sense that he would do it in poetry--no time to construct a narrative with existence so compressed.

What's curious, though, is how few writers have reported back on their experience of the end of life. Janet Hobhouse was at work on her final novel "The Furies," when she died of cancer in 1991; the closing chapters chart the vagaries of "this dying business" with a fierce unwillingness to look away.

Raymond Carver's poetry collection "A New Path to the Waterfall" was completed days before his death in August 1988; here's the last poem, "Late Fragment," in its entirety:

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: Jacket Copy: The literature of death

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