Product Description

Sensual, earthy love poems that formed the basis for the popular movie Il Postino, now in a beautiful gift book perfect for weddings, Valentine's Day, anniversaries, or just to say "I love you!" Charged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda's love poems are the most celebrated of the Nobel Prize winner's oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images and reveling in a fiery re-imagining of the world. Mostly written on the island paradise of Capri (the idyllic setting of the Oscar-winning movie Il Postino), Love Poems embraces the seascapes surrounding the poet and his love Matilde Urrutia, their waves and shores saturated with a new, yearning eroticism.

And when you appear
all the rivers sound
in my body, bells
shake the sky,
and a hymn fills the world.
        © 1973 by Neruda & Walsh
.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #115113 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780811217293
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
It is difficult to find an analogue for the sustained passion and gentleness communicated in this absolutely stunning apotheosis of the poetry of sexual love....Matilde Urrutia deserves to enter history in the company of Petrarch’s Laura and Dante’s Beatrice.(Library Journal)

One of the greatest major poets of the twentieth century. (The New York Times Book Review)

About the Author
Pablo Neruda was born in 1904 in the town of Parral in Chile. He received numerous prestigious awards for his work, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. In 1971, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Two years later he died of leukemia in Santiago, Chile.

Customer Reviews

Shame on you, New Directions
James Laughlin must be turning in his grave. New Directions, one of the greatest presses in 20th Century literary history, has sunk to the wrong directions now in the 21st: they are letting marketing triumph over literary ethics and literature itself: This "Love Poems" is just a slick deceptive cover of Neruda's single book, "The Captain's Verses," which in itself is a great book, an important book in Neruda's oeuvre, with a good translation by Donald Walsh-- but to be so deceptive and re-title it as a marketing gimmick?

I returned this book to Amazon after I found out what was underneath the false cover.

They say "in later editions, these verses became the most celebrated of the Noble Prize winner's oeuvre" In later editions? This is one edition, and it's not true that it "collects Neruda's most passionate verses." It collects some of them, but with The Captain's Verses there's a bunch of mediocre poems. Neruda had a high batting average, but not every poem he wrote was outstanding. Frankly, I'm peeved at ND for this gimmickry. The great press under Laughlin that took risks and brought us William Carlos Williams, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, Lawrence Ferlinghetti-- you want a vanguard press that would never succumb to commercialism over the inherent principles of literature-- Ferlinghetti's City Lights-- If you want Neruda's love poetry, check out his The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems-- it truly is the essence of Pablo, with some of his best love poems. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Dual Language Edition (Penguin Classics)is of course one of poetry's great classics, but it only represents the voice of Neruda in his twenties, without the broad scope and some of his best love lyrcis throughout one of the most prolific careers in the history of modern poetry. 100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor (Texas Pan American Series) has some great Neruda love poems, but the majority, trully, aren't so great. And personally, along with others I know, feel that much of the inherent power of Neruda's poems in this book are lost in Tapscott's flat translations. If you do want The Captain's Verses, show New Directions that you can't judge--or change, for marketing reasons--a book by its cover, and get the original, The Captain's Verses

It took foreverrrrrrrr
It seriously took 3 weeks to get my books. It said that I would get my book in 5-6 days, not 3 freaking weeks! It sucked. Anyways, Pablo Neruda rules!