A famed and lauded collection of love, obsession and longing. These poems hit different in my thirties. Although the language is beautiful, evocative and strikingly original, I found the poet's obsession overly focused on the body of the women he wrote about. In many of these poems the expressed love felt shallow and overly focused on the object's youth and physical beauty. To complement someone's beauty isn't necessarily wrong, but "love" is a strong word to ascribe to it. Desiring to possess a woman is an interesting subject for a poem, but again, I wouldn't call it love.

These perhaps pedantic criticisms aside, these verses are very much worth reading. The author's mastery of the form is clear and this collection is very rewarding to perused slowly, savoring each word for its own delights.

Favorite Poems: The Morning is Full, So That You Will Hear Me, I Remember You As You Were, We Have Lost Even, Almost Out of the Sky, Here I Love You ( )

A little too short for my taste. I felt there wasn’t enough “poetical substance” to be consumed to give it justice on its own. There are some notable poems, however, that penetrate rather deep and are sensuously vivid. Perhaps I will prefer Neruda’s larger collections. ( )

I'm not a huge fan of poetry but I enjoyed the design a lot (except the font choice) and the poems were interesting too. There are references to despair or at least sadness in each of these poems, despite the title. Each poem is printed in English on the right and the original Spanish on the left. I know enough Spanish to enjoy reading the originals, but with this kind of poetic language I would have been lost without the English side-by-side with the Spanish. I took my time reading it, using each poem and it's translation as a reset of my brain between chapters of a dense text I was reading. The language is flowing, if often mysterious. He seems to mentally live in the twilght of day, of life, Regarding the very pretty layout, the Spanish was printed in a font where some lower-case letters were hard to tell apart and that was not helpful given my incomplete knowledge of the language. For instance, the lower-case b and h were extremely close in appearance. In any case, as a non-poetry fan who is just open to reading anything, I recommend this collection for all readers. ( )

Neruda's most famous collection, published when he was nineteen. Sometimes beautiful and surprising, sometimes loud and bombastic. The poet still seems to be at the stage in his life when love is essentially the same thing as football, a competition between young men (involving a lot of shouting and posturing) that women are meant to watch from the sidelines. The women in these poems don't speak — he prefers them when they are silent: "Me gustas quando callas porque estás como ausente" — and they don't seem to exist much except as sets of body parts, not always flatteringly described ("Se parecen tus senos a los caracoles blancos"). There's no way of knowing whether the poems are about one specific woman, a series of women, or a completely abstract female figure. Possibly the last of these, given how often he talks about dolls and statues.

But the images are always breathtaking, even though Neruda draws them from a fairly narrow range (maritime stuff like waves, nets, harbours, anchors, lighthouses, seagulls and mooring lines; bees and butterflies; ears of corn; weather).

I suspect that these are poems that grow on you when you read them aloud just for the sound of the words, without thinking too much about what they are supposed to mean. ( )

I recognize it's beloved, I guess it's just not my thing. ( )