Fully Empowered

“The greatest poet of the twentieth century – in any language.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Fully Empowered was first published in Spanish in 1962 and was one of Neruda’s favourites among his own works, and he specifically asked his finest translator, Alastair Reid, to translate it into English. Neruda loved this collection partly because it grew from the most fruitful period of his own life but also because it was a representative selection of the vast range of his poetry.
The thirty-six poems vary from short, intense lyrics, characteristic Neruda odes, whimsical addresses to friends, and his magnificent mediations on the role of the poet. Within Fully Empowered are many poems among the greatest of Neruda’s work, including ‘The People’, his most celebrated later poem.
In his last years Neruda was preoccupied with the contradictions of human experience, and in this volume he fully explores the theme of the poet as a cluster of different, often contradictory, selves. Anyone familiar with Neruda’s work is aware that there are many Nerudas, many distinct poetic styles, and Fully Empowered demonstrates the dazzling diversity, in style and theme, of the most inexhaustible poet of the twentieth century.