In the over one hundred poems contained in Isla Negra, Pablo Neruda fashioned a kind of poetic autobiography in which he set out to explore and gather the various "lives" or "selves" he had left behind him in the huge span of his writing existence. Written in his "autumnal" period, from the vantage point of Isla Negra, the small village on the Pacific coast of Chile which he came to regard as the center of his world, the book reads like a series of...

In a long poem, the Chilean poet says farewell to his land and people and considers the human spirit, personal commitment, and the history of his culture.

"Joaquín Murieta, the historical person, was a Chilean highwayman who was captured and executed in California on July 24, 1853. The hero of this dramatic poem is an adventurous young man who sails from Valparaíso to San Francisco in 1849-50 with his wife, Teresa, and his friend, Three-Fingered Jack, to strike it rich in the goldfields. But, as Neruda puts it, Murieta 'never guessed that his nationality would be divided and his personality diminished.'...

Poems dealing with the soiled aspect of the human condition and the sumptuous appeal of the tactile are presented in Spanish and English.

"Perhaps no other poet received in his lifetime the international recognition and honors that Pablo Neruda received, was so widely translated, or exerted such far-reaching influence. His name has long been a byword in the Spanish-speaking world (in his own country, he tells us, even the stones know his voice), and over the past decade he has been increasingly read and admired in the United States and England. Neruda's long-awaited memoirs begin with...

"This is the first English translation of this poem sequence which grew out of a trip the Nobel laureate took to Easter Island in 1971. Alternating between "The Men" and "The Island," Neruda observes the last remnants of the ancient world in direct opposition to the present, the guilty pathos of our time in opposition to the timeless vital purity of the island itself. In this poem, Neruda comes closest to reconstructing our prehistoric connection...