A bilingual edition that makes available for the first time a substantial selection of Neruda's Elemental Odes, originally published in Spanish in three volumes. The Odes were written in the mid-fifties when Neruda was at the height of his powers, and are explorations and celebrations of man's relation to the natural and man-made world. They are straightforward and immediate and are considered his most approachable and popular work. 67 odes are printed in this volume of which about a dozen have appeared (in different translations) in English collections of Neruda before.

Poems in Spanish with parallel English translations.

A collection of revised and expanded writings culled from the author's popular Washington Post Book World "Poet's Choice" column demonstrates how poetry responds to world challenges and introduces the work of more than 130 writers.

The Poetry of Pablo Neruda offers the most comprehensive English-language collection ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel García Márquez). "In his work a continent awakens to consciousness," wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers and political figures-a loyal member of the Communist party, a lifelong diplomat and onetime senator, a man lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet." Born Neftali Basoalto, Neruda adopted his pen name in fear of his family's disapproval, and yet by the age of twenty-five he was already famous for the book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which remains his most beloved. During the next fifty years, a seemingly boundless metaphorical language linked his romantic fantasies and the fierce moral and political compass-exemplified in books such as Canto General-that made him an adamant champion of the dignity of ordinary men and women. Edited and with an introduction by Ilan Stavans, this is the most comprehensive single-volume collection of this prolific poet's work in English. Here the finest translations of nearly six hundred poems by Neruda are collected and join specially commissioned new translations that attest to Neruda's still-resounding presence in American letters.

Forty-nine poetic works provide glimpses into the wonders of everyday life.

Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and cultural boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach.