Isla Negra

''The greatest poet of the twentieth century - in any language.''
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

''Pablo Nerada moves fast, and Reid follows alertly, ingeniously; his translations in this book are superb.''
Robert Bly, New York Times.

In Isla Negra Pablo Neruda set out to explore his landscape, his roots and experience in an attempt to gather into unity the various ''lives'' he had left behind in the huge span of his writing career. From the more than hundred poems he created a poetic autobiography centred round his home of Isla Negra. Neruda had come to consider Isla Negra, a small village on the Pacific coast of Chile, as the centre of his world. The poems move from childhood impressions and awakenings through his early loves, travels and the dawning of his political awareness to self-scrutiny and self-definition. Among their variety Neruda embraces the apparent contradictions of his life.
Throughout the poems, present and past interact, and this collection becomes the most revealing of Neruda's long career. The poems of Isla Negra display the astonishing abundance of the human imagination when mingled with memory.

This edition is of the highly acclaimed translation by Alastair Reid.


Pablo Neruda one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. Neruda was a poet, refugee, Ambassador and politician and his life reflects the same intensity as seen in his poetry. First published by Souvenir Press in 1977, who have also published Neruda's Isla Negra, Residence on Earth and Fully Empowered, this edition is re-published for the centenary of Pablo Neruda's birth, celebrated in 2004.