A collection of old and new words features words to be said in singing moods, words for times of day, and rude names for nitwits, and defines such words as gongoozler, tantony, and cosse.

In the over one hundred poems contained in Isla Negra, Pablo Neruda fashioned a kind of poetic autobiography in which he set out to explore and gather the various "lives" or "selves" he had left behind him in the huge span of his writing existence. Written in his "autumnal" period, from the vantage point of Isla Negra, the small village on the Pacific coast of Chile which he came to regard as the center of his world, the book reads like a series of...

In his long life as a poet, Pablo Neruda succeeded in becoming what many poets have aspired to but never achieved: a public voice, a voice not just for the people of his country but for his entire continent. Widely translated, he probably reached more readers than any poet in history; justly so, for, as he often said, his "poet's obligation" was to become a voice for all those who had no voice, an aspiration that stemmed from his long-time commitment...