Volume 50, Number 14 · September 25, 2003
Poetry in Unlikely Places
By Charles Simic
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
edited and with an introduction by Ilan Stavans
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 996 pp., $40.00
The book that came to mean a lot to me as a young poet was an anthology of Latin American poetry that I discovered in a used bookstore in New York in 1959. Originally published in 1942 by New Directions, it had long been out of print, so neither I nor any of my poet friends had an inkling of its existence. It introduced me to the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Vicente Huidobro, Nicolás Guillén, César Vallejo, and dozens of other wonderful poets I had never heard of until that moment. I remember turning its pages in the store, realizing what a valuable book it was, paying for it quickly, and rushing home to read all of its 666 pages that very night. It was like reading Eliot's 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' for the first time, seeing a Buster Keaton movie, hearing Thelonius Monk, and making other such exhilarating discoveries. I knew French Surrealist poetry, had already read Lorca, Mayakovsky, and Brecht, but I had never before encountered anything quite like this poem of Neruda's:
Review, 4084 words
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