Amazon.com Review
Gabriel Garcia Marquez considered Pablo Neruda the greatest poet of the century. Besides his poetry, he left the world a legacy of love for humanity and for the power of language to change society. In this bilingual collection, photographs of Neruda's beloved house at Isla Negra are combined with his own words of explanation and his inimitable poetry.
The house, of which Neruda says, "I don't know when it was born into me," faces the Pacific Ocean, subject of many of the poet's meditations. In Neruda's prose poem, "The Sea," he sketches the vast timelessness of the Pacific: "It was so large, wild and blue that it didn't fit anywhere. That's why it was left in front of my window." Like time itself, the ocean is so unfathomable that anyone can disappear, "and the water doesn't know it."
The poem "The House" shows the relationship of house, stone, and man when he imagines stone as a previous home and says, "I touch this stone, and for me it hasn't died: / it's what I was, what I will be." This beautiful collection of poems is like a scattering of thoughts on the shore that Neruda has strung together into a song of life. --Susan Swartwout
From Library Journal
This collection combines three short works?House in the Sand, The Stones of Chile, and Seaquake?translated in 1986, 1990, and 1993, respectively. All three were inspired by the desolate Chilean coastline, whose marine cries and primal warnings spoke to Nobel laureate Neruda in a "hoarse and drenching language." The first part centers on the sea, which can dissolve a man like a bar of salt, and on the poet's seaside home, where he lived from 1939. On the high beams of the roof the poet carved the cherished names of dead friends, including Federico Garcia Lorca, because "their names will not slip down." The second part is reflective, inviting readers to discover for themselves the "secret of stone and of life." The poet even suggests that the comfortable silence of his stark retreat has kept him from doing more for the Communist movement. The final section is succinctly descriptive of life forms disturbed by the raging tide (seals, crabs, seaweed, starfish, and sea urchin), which, like love, is "wet, secret and hostile." Recommended wherever Neruda is popular.?Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
