About The Book

This bilingual volume is the definitive collection of the poetry of Pablo Neruda, the 1971 Nobel Prize winner, “our great Latin-American Whitmanesque father” (Library Journal), and one of the most profoundly influential poets of the twentieth century. His love poems are earthy and transcendent, and his political poems are the work of a man as incisive, impassioned, and ferociously intelligent as he was sensual. “Neruda’s poetry inevitably calls forth Wagnerian language from overwhelmed observers—force of nature, “avalanche,” “volcano’ . . . [He] led an epic life as a revolutionary prophet and . . . national hero in Chile” (The New York Times Book Review).

Ben Belitt has drawn the 138 selections in Five Decades from all of Neruda’s major works, including the early volumes Residence on Earth, General Song, Elemental Odes, Voyages and Homecomings, Book of Vagaries, A Hundred Love Sonnets, Black Island Memorial, and the later The Hands of Day, World’s End, and Skystones.

Praise

“The most prolific, influential and inventive poet of the Spanish language.” –The New York Times Book Review

“It is difficult to speak of Pablo Neruda’s poetry as poetry. It is easier to compare him to Bartok for his driving rhythms, his intensity of passion, or to Stravinsky for his harsh dissonances and strange harmonies. Or if not music, perhaps painting. Critic Angel Flores likens him to Picasso . . . [for] “their fertile, chameleon-like creativeness, their constant, unpredictable transformations.” –The Christian Science Monitor

“The poems, in both Spanish and English, are so extraordinarily quotable that no sampling will suffice. . . . A magnificent legacy by perhaps the greatest living poet of this century.” –Library Journal