Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29407 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04
• Original language: Spanish
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

The Bloomsbury Review
If you want a handy Neruda companion and don't know where to begin, this is it.

The Austin Chronicle, April 2, 2004
I can think of few other books that have given me so much delight so easily.

Customer Reviews

Best edition of selected Neruda poems
I love Neruda and I love this book.

"The call for a more accessible collection of Neruda's important poems is answered with City Lights' The Essential Neruda, a 200-page edition that offers 50 of Neruda's key poems. The editors and translators know how to extract gold from a lifetime of prolific writing. If you want a handy Neruda companion and don't know where to begin, this is it." – The Bloomsbury Review

From the back cover "What better way to celebrate the hundred years of Neruda's glorious residence on our earth than this selection of crucial works - in both languages! - by one of the greatest poets of all time. A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again." -- Ariel Dorfman, pulitzer prize winner

Poetry on Fire
To read the poetry of Pablo Neruda is to feel the pulse and beat of life so strongly that you would swear his poems were living breathing beings. His language is that of the land, and of the body combined; love, death, life, the land, the world and Chile are his subjects. There is the texture of stone, the violence of water, the swiftness of wind, the colours of blood and the splinters of bone; it is poetry of fire and intensity that once read will never be forgotten.

This volume beautifully brings together, side by side, the original Spanish and the English translations of a selection of 50 "essential" poems written over a 40 year period. They include some of the passionate, sensual "Twenty Love Poems" and also the splendid, soaring grace of his "Macchu Picchu" collection. Everything about this book is perfect, from the symbolic red poppy on the cover to the elongated font it is printed in.

I have read many, many poets, and I am struck by an incomparable, almost uncontainable vigour, energy and spirit that sizzles from every Neruda poem; they almost burst. This is poetry that works on a visceral level, and once in your blood, it will never let you go.

This is not just essential Neruda; it is essential poetry.

From: Heights of Macchu Picchu: VI

And then on the ladder of the earth I climbed
through the atrocious thicket of the lost jungles
up to you, Macchu Picchu.
High city of scaled stones,
at last a dwelling where the terrestrial
did not hide in its sleeping clothes.
In you, like two parallel lines,
the cradle of the lightning-bolt and man
rocked together in a thorny wind.