Poetic anthology

Bringing together classic poems from his first work, Anthology of Poetry by Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, now in a bilingual edition.

This poetry anthology brings together poems written by Pablo Neruda from his first book, Crepusculario (1923), to Las manos del día (The Hands of the Day ) (1968), showcasing various facets of the poet, from love to melancholy and politics. His relationship with nature and love of life are also evident.

Translated by Eliane Zagury, the book has a foreword by Jorge Edwards, writer, diplomat and personal friend of Pablo Neruda, and a brief chronology of Neruda's life and work by Margarita Aguirre, Chilean writer, literary critic and the poet's first biographer.

As the writer José Castello writes in the blurb:

"The great characteristic of Neruda's poetry is its intensity, which can be found both in the events of the continent's history, such as in Canto General , and in the cracks of small, harmless things, such as in the odes to the onion, the sand, the moth. A poet of strong character, he leaves his reader no choice: either they cling passionately to his books, or they will have no true access to them.

Poetry, as Neruda defined it in his "Poetic Art," is "a relentless movement, and a confusing name." A terrain of clashes, of uninterrupted struggle, of disturbance, in which all elements of the cosmos participate. Nothing escapes it. He saw literature as the terrain of unrest ("Mother unrest, I drank from your breasts / electrified bed"). And the poet, like a needy and sentimental man, digging into the things of the world, searching for a nonexistent depth.

A poet of movement, inconstancy, and fright, Neruda needed no heteronyms or masks to multiply himself into numerous writers, all with a single name. He thus pointed to the inexhaustible richness of the human, whose image, fickle, restless, and always fragmented, fits only in a mirror of words.