I only wish I knew Spanish, so I could read Neruda poems in their native tongue. For me, I find him such a romantic. His poetry can bring tears, smile, is simply written and profound all at the same time.

Might be the greatest poetry collection I've read. His voice is so genuine and definite and moving.

Wow... These poems were selected by Neruda himself for this compilation and translated by four famous translators, including WS Merwyn. Not only is the book filled with utterly soul-bending poetry, but reading it is a great way to polish up your Spanish. English on the right page, Spanish on the left. Beauty (with a capital B) comes from reading each out loud in Spanish--transcendentally gorgeous--then sussing out nuance for your English-thinking mind by reading the same poem in your own language. A bit sadly, I feel, the English versions sometimes miss the depth and fullness of his poetic soulfulness reminding English speakers that their language can be technically frigid and perhaps, at times, an inferior tool for rendering some subtle concepts when compared to the romance of the Romance languages. Sometimes, you just can't get there from here.

Por muchos defectos que haya tenido Neruda - que no eran pocos y que además cada vez salen más a la luz - su obra lírica es INCREÍBLE.

Creo, de hecho, que gracias a él es que me gusta la literatura, que vino al principio a mí de mano de la poesía. Por haber tenido la suerte de haber crecido rodeada de varios de los poemas que hay en esta selección. La mayoría todavía me los sé de memoria.

Hay pocas cosas más completas, más límpidas, más preciosas, más perfectas.

I have to be honest and say that it took me a little while to get into these poems. When I started reading them they did not make sense.

Neruda’s style is very visual for me, using mostly images from nature, and after a while I stopped trying to understand exactly what he was saying and just enjoyed the words and the images he was painting. This was when I started truly enjoying his work. I felt the ebb and flow of his work and the feelings that he was portraying.

He has a clear connection to the sea and nature and that shines through in this collection of poems, often using the water to portray a feeling, a restlessness or longing, but also wonder. I enjoyed the free verse style he uses. It makes it more of a narrative somehow.

I think this is a great collection that gave me a good taste of what Pablo Neruda was all about. This is a dual language edition and I liked looking at the Spanish versions of the poems, even if I am unable to understand the language.

If you enjoy nature and looking at the world in a different light, Neruda may well be the poet for you. I certainly enjoy his work and I will seek out more from him for sure.

neruda always down SO bad

I took my time reading through Pablo Neruda's poems and I appreciated the translation from one page to the next, but I cant help but feel like I was missing something by reading it in english. Althugh it was obvious that his poems were filled with passion about both love and the world as well. Two of my favorite snips from poems in his collection are:

"Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey."

"Well, now
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you
Little by little
If suddenly you forget me
Do not look for me
For I shall already have forgotten you"

Pablo Neruda, my one and only favourite poet. I first came across Neruda’s poems whilst searching for poems for my wedding in 2019. I visited his home ‘La Sebastiana’ in Valparaiso on the honeymoon and was enamored with it. I bought the merch and souvenirs.

The poetry itself was beautiful. Each one captured a moment, a feeling, a place, a time. I particularly liked the string of poems about nature. My favourite was The Wave. Here is a snippet:

‘The wave comes up from the bottom, with roots that are the daughters of the submerged firmament. Its elastic invasion was mounted by the pure potency of the Ocean: its eternity came on inundating the pavilions of deep dominion, each essence offering resistance, as it scattered cold fire from its waist until from the boughs in full force it loosed its snowtopped might.’

I also liked the ones about devotion to something, whether it be a person, a body, a ship returning on the horizon. I think I like Neruda’s raw expressions of being pathetic. There were some about being so desperate for one last touch or pleading whether they will ever see them again.

I was not able to actually visualise what a lot of the poems were saying. I just knew they sounded good at the time and tried to make sense of them as best I could. So I usually only read a few pages at a time to take it all in hence the long reading time (>6 months) for this book.

For the language learners out there, this book has the original poem in Spanish on the left, and in English on the right. Although the language is cryptic and could be challenging. So perhaps better for the advanced level.

Even though poetry is not my thing, I really enjoyed reading this and I’m glad I got to experience it.

i think what i really like about Neruda’s poems is their sense of whimsy but they carry a lot of weight at first they seem like really amusing word salad but they definitely have a really good punch to them, very solid collection

This:
“I want
to do with you what Spring does with the cherry trees.”

Buried in an early poem in this collection, “Every Day You Play,” this line won me over, made my knees weak. It kept coming to my mind the rest of that day, and the next. Who is able to write such a line?

Pablo Neruda has a gift. Where we see a tomato, he sees this, from "Ode to the Tomato":
“red viscera, a fresh, deep, inexhaustible sun floods the salads of Chile.”

What more can we ask for in a poet, than to show us the beauty we have missed?

As he puts it so perfectly in “Too Many Names,”
"I have a mind to confuse things,
unite them, bring them to birth,
mix them up, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the oneness of the ocean,
a generous, vast wholeness,
a crepitant fragrance.”

This collection is a delight, a feast. But unlike a meal, these poems can be savored again and again, which is exactly what I plan to do.

Well, if i was asked to rate his works in single word then it's ASTOUNDING. He is God in what he does. What a fabulous vocabulary and the inspiration that he took from his surroundings. I as a poetess myself, i'll say he inspired me to write again. It was refreshing to read his poems and one of the poem that i personally loved was ''Widower's Tango''. You get so much insight about his life and the kind of person he was. Full of heart, love and inspiration. One of my best poetry books that i've ever read.

There are no words which can explain how beautiful these poems are!

I was under the impression that Neruda writes only poems about LOVE. But what an imbecile presumption! How great and beautiful his empathetic poems of slaughtered children, blood-spilled streets, harpooned whales, ambushed bird-nests, threatening months, deep oceans, weary fishermen, and love-sick hearts are!