First published in 1924, Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada remains among Pablo Neruda's most popular work. Daringly metaphorical and sensuous, this collection juxtaposes youthful passion with the desolation of grief. Drawn from the poet's most intimate and personal associations, the poems combine eroticism and the natural world with the influence of expressionism and the genius of a...

When it appeared in 1924, this work launched into the international spotlight a young and unknown poet whose writings would ignite a generation. W. S. Merwin's incomparable translation faces the original Spanish text. Now in a black-spine Classics edition with an introduction by Cristina Garcia, this book stands as an essential collection that continues to inspire lovers and poets around the world.

For more than...

"Laughter is the language of the soul," Pablo Neruda said. Among the most lasting voices of the most tumultuous (in his own words, "the saddest") century, a witness and a chronicler of its most decisive events, he is the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, the emblem of the engaged poet, an artist whose heart, always with the people, is literally consumed by passion. His work, oscillating from epic meditations on politics and history to intimate reflections on animals, food, and everyday objects, is filled with humor and...

The Heights of Macchu Picchu is the finest and most famous of Neruda's longer poems and provides the key to his earlier work. It was inspired by his journey to Macchu Picchu, the Peruvian Inca city high in the Andes. Neruda's journey takes on all the symbolic qualities of a personal "venture into the interior" as the poem progresses, exploring both the roots of the poet's identity and the history of Latin America. This translation has been rendered by the distinquished poet Nathaniel Tarn and is presented in a bilingual edition, with the Spanish and English texts on facing...

Extravagaria marks an important stage in Neruda's progress as a poet. The book was written just after he had returned to Chile after many wanderings and moved to his beloved Isla Negra on the Pacific coast. These sixty-eight poems thus denote a resting point, a rediscovery of sea and land, and an "autumnal period" (as the poet himself called it). In this book, Neruda developed a lyric poetry decidedly more personal than his earlier work.

An important collection that includes some of the Nobel Prize winner's own favorite poems.

"The Sea"
A single entity, but no blood.
A single caress, death or a rose.
The sea comes in and puts our lives together
and attacks alone and spreads itself and sing
sin nights and days and men and living creatures.
Its essence-fire and cold; movement, movement.

Pablo Neruda himself regarded Fully Empowered -- which first appeared in Spanish in 1962 under the title Plenos Poderes -- as a particular favorite, in part...

Pablo Neruda is known first as a poet, but the prose pieces in this collection reflect the enormous hunger he demonstrated throughout his career for new modes of expression, new adventures, new challenges. Passions and Impressions is both a sequel to and an enlargement of Neruda's Memoirs, recording a lifetime of travel, of friendships and enmities, of exile and homecoming, of loss and discovery, and of history both public and personal. Above all, it is a testament to Neruda's love for Chile-for its citizens, its flora and fauna, its national identity. His abiding devotion pervades these...

The classic and deeply moving memoir by Pablo Neruda, the most widely read political poet of our time and winner of the Nobel Prize

The south of Chile was a frontier wilderness when Pablo Neruda was born in 1904. In these memoirs he retraces his bohemian student years in Santiago; his sojourns as Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, in Spain during the civil war, and in Mexico; and his service as a Chilean senator. Neruda, a Communist, was driven from his senate seat in 1948, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a year in hiding, he escaped on horseback over...

The most comprehensive English-language collection of work ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel Garcia Marque)

"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet."

This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores...