FOREWORD

Pablo Neruda's poetry is vast in many ways. There are several thousand pages of it, to begin with, very uneven in quality but stunning in its sheer profusion. Neruda couldn't help writing poems, he wrote as naturally as he breathed, wrote with the unthinking, exuberant abundance of Nature herself. He makes most other great modern poets seem pinched, restrained, perfectionistic. Compared with him, even Whitman had writer's block.

Making a selection from this abundance was like standing in some treasure cave from The Thousand and One Nights: coffers and urns overbrimming with jewels lay all around me, but my companion genie said I was only allowed to fill my own pockets. So I made no effort to be representative, to take an equal number of diamonds, pearls, emeralds, sapphires, rings, massive necklaces, filagree bracelets, pre-Columbian animal figurines of pure gold, platinum large-breasted goddesses with ruby nipples. I just took what I loved most. When my pockets were full, I left.

I had to l eave behind many of Neruda's greatest poems, because they weren't my favorites: the passionate youthful hymns to sex of Twenty Poems of Love, the dark, lonely, outraged, restless brilliance of Residence on Earth, the encyclopedic hymn to the Americas that is Canto General, with its masterpiece “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” As great as some of these poems obviously are, I am not often drawn to reread them.