Passions and Impression

Pablo Neruda is known first as a poet, but the prose pieces in this collection reflect the enormous hunger he demonstrated throughout his career for new modes of expression, new adventures, new challenges. Passions and Impressions is both a sequel to and an enlargement of Neruda's Memoirs, recording a lifetime of travel, of friendships and enmities, of exile and homecoming, of loss and discovery, and of history both public and personal. Above all, it is a testament to Neruda's love for Chile-for its citizens, its flora and fauna, its national identity. His abiding devotion pervades these notes on a life fully lived.

"These prose pieces display the same adventurousness, gift for observation, and lyrical exactitude that mark Neruda's poetry... ."---Publisher weekly

These prose pieces display the same adventurousness, gift for observation and lyrical exactitude that mark Neruda's poetry.

When presenting the legendary Chilean poet Pablo Neruda with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, Karl Ragnar Gierow of the Swedish Academy proclaimed, "Neruda is like catching a condor with a butterfly net. Neruda, in a nutshell, is an unreasonable proposition: the kernel bursts the shell."