Sublime Blue: Selected Early Odes by Pablo Neruda

Neruda once suggested that his words be poured, like wine, "into the glasses of other languages." Here is just such a communion. Noted American poet William Pitt Root brings us poems from the first of Neruda's three collections of odes, Odas elementales (1954). In his introduction, Root praises Neruda's form, with its phrases that "fall like thin wrists of water cascading from great heights, exploding at intervals against ledges and obstacles protruding from a sheer cliff-face. Fluent, sinuous, riddled with delightful surprise, the offhand form is also suited to the tone of seemingly casual surmise that can so suddenly pool in a conclusion of great clarity and depth." Here are poems addressed to hope and gloom, to numbers and to the atom, to blue flowers and artichokes. This is Neruda at his finest. Book jacket.