Isla Negra

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 a 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. Through-out 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.