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The Lost Neruda Poems

8/30/2016

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Then Come Back
The Lost Neruda Poems
Translated by Forrest Gander
Copper Canyon Press
Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman
 
Pablo Neruda is perhaps best known for his love poems, and this volume does not disappoint. Several poems celebrate
 Matilde, the poet’s muse and third wife, through direct and indirect references. Matilde inspired Neruda’s work, including over 600 published poems.
 
Other poems praise his Chilean homeland, bordered by the Pacific coast to the west and the cordilleras of the rugged mountains to the east. One poem describes the land slipping out of sight as a ship, likely carrying Neruda to one of his diplomatic posts, moves out to sea. He also celebrates the rugged nature and the resilience of his countrymen, the Chilenos. In the poem, which gives the book its title, Neruda advises a younger poet to “toughen up/ take a walk/ over the sharp stones/ then come back.” He remembers his own youth in this same piece.   
 
Archivists found manuscripts for these twenty-one poems and fragments while conducting an inventory of the poet’s personal papers, now in the custody of the Neruda Foundation. The new volume went to press in Spanish forty years after Neruda’s death, coincidentally near the time when new evidence came to light supporting the long-held belief that the poet was assassinated by a follower of the military dictator Augusto Pinochet, a man whose brutal regime ordered the execution, torture, and “forced disappearance” of thousands of people.  
 
Rather than publish the poems in Spanish and in English translation on facing pages, the Copper Canyon edition presents the English and Spanish versions in separate sections. Facsimiles of some of the original handwritten drafts also appear in this unique volume. The book is an excellent read from one of the twentieth century's great poets.
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Wendigo Way

8/3/2016

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This poem is based on an Algonquin legend of the North woods. I have borrowed from their culture in its composition. In many ways, I see this story as a metaphor for modern day America.
​
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The Wendigo is born
in the hunger moon
a cautionary tale of
hard times and short supplies.
 
Born of the time when frost
paints the ground, he sees
only shortage, seeks to seize
what he wants from others.
 
More than that, he is a cannibal.
He glowers across a clearing and
gives chase as you dash away.
Forget your dignity, run.
 
Only the bravest soul hunts Wendigo.
No chain can hold him,
his hair a static electric shock.
No fawn will gambol in his woods.
 
Wendigo ate his own lips
in lust for human flesh,
but he was once a man.
Remember that when
you wish for just a little more.
 
Ray Zimmerman
Chattanooga, TN
znaturalis at ​gmail.com

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