Other poets have recognized the ironic blurring of opposing forces that often occurs in wartime. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,īecause night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.Īnd some of our men just in from the border say (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? The poem describes a citizenry so fully afraid of a barbarian invasion that the society has stopped functioning. Cavafy explored this problem in his allegorical poem " Waiting for the Barbarians," written in 1898. Some poets have focused on another devastating effect of war: the fear engendered when citizens and nations are forced to take sides, to answer the questions, who is "good?" who is "evil?" C. Likewise, in "The Diameter of the Bomb," Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai finds that poetic descriptions can falter and fail in the face of violent tragedy:Īnd I won’t even mention the howl of orphans In Pablo Neruda’s famous poem about the Spanish Civil War, "I Explain a Few Things," he discards metaphor entirely to say: "in the streets the blood of the children / ran simply, like the blood of children." At the end of the poem he implores the reader to look at the devastating results of war: Other poets have concentrated their writing on the horrifying impact of war on civilians. The numerous conflicts of the twentieth century produced poets, including those who served as soldiers in World War I, who turned their pens to documenting the tragic effects of war. But while Homer may have idealized his combatants and revered their triumphant, incessant fighting, the treatment of war in poetry has grown increasingly more complex since then. The poems are also formally various-some discursive and free-versey, some impressionistic, some driven by anaphora and other older forms.War has long figured as a theme in poetry-after all, some of the world's oldest surviving poems are about great armies and heroic battles. We get a few odes (for which he was known), powerful political poems, melancholy poems of exile, and, of course, a gob of love poems. (My favorite one is a love poem that uses a lot of food metaphors that was written on a piece of stationery that says "Menu.")Ĭovering a little over 20 years of his life, the book works like a Neruda sampler, revealing sides of the poet I hadn't seen before. Ogling the full-color scans of the original material reproduced in the book feels as if you're discovering the poems along with the archivists. Having five of 21 poems be good is about the same as liking three songs on an album: a rare accomplishment.Īdditionally, and to the cultural materialist's delight, many of these poems were scribbled out (in green pen, which I find affecting for some strange reason) on scrap paper, napkins, playbills, and other ephemera. The majority of the apparently complete works included in the book are as good as Neruda poems can be, and exactly five are true shining gifts to the world. Luckily for us all, cynicism and skepticism prove to have been the wrong models for considering Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda. Even Forrest Gander, the great professor/poet/novelist/Pulitzer Prize finalist who renders the lost poems into English, admits in the introduction to having said that "the last thing we need is another Neruda translation," and he worries that a lost-poems-found edition might just be a case of "squeezing the last purple juices from the Neruda estate." The foundation probably found a bunch of scraps crumpled in the back of some rolltop desk in storage-they would hardly not publish them. Pablo Neruda-who, according to newish reports from the Chilean government, may have been assassinated (he died less than three weeks after General Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup)-is one of five poets most Americans can name. The worry in such situations, though, is that the poems will be bad.Ī cynic considers the market. The news that Pablo Neruda Foundation archivists had found 21 previously unpublished poems by the inimitable and amorous Chilean poet did to the hearts of many readers what spring does to the cherry trees.
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