Pablo Neruda: Absence and Presence

10 best books like Pablo Neruda: Absence and Presence (Luis Poirot): Odes to Common Things, The Dead and the Living, The Art of the Lathe, This Time: New and Selected Poems, The Angel of History, What We Carry, Reasons for Moving / Darker / The Sargentville Notebook, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life

Odes to Common Things

Author	Pablo Neruda
ISBN	0821220802

Naming the simple things of the natural world, Neruda’s odes address everything, for everyone. With his painstakingly unadorned language, Neruda aims to capture all facets of everyday life within his odes, in a manner not unlike that of the realist photographer. Be his subject alive or inanimate,...

The Dead and the Living

Author	Sharon Olds
ISBN	0394715632

I saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poem:

Possessed (for my parents)

I have never left.
Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth...

The Art of the Lathe

Author	B.H. Fairchild
ISBN	1882295161

I might give this book five stars just on the basis of the poems "Beauty" and "Body and Soul." The first is a stunning hymn to the American resistance to beauty (that soft and useless presence in the world). The second is one of the greatest poems to use a sport (baseball) as its platform--though of course...

This Time: New and Selected Poems

Author	Gerald Stern
ISBN	0393319091

"This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: 'Why did it take so long /...

The Angel of History

Author	Carolyn Forché
ISBN	0060925841

Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forche's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. These poems reflect the effects of such experience:...

What We Carry

Author	Dorianne Laux
ISBN	1880238071

Hadn't read this in a dozen or more years (thanks again Boone), and it's hot-damn fantastic. Here's an excerpt from one of my favorites, "After Twelve Days of Rain," which you can hear her read here:

Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood
hatless in the rain and the whole world
went...

Reasons for Moving / Darker / The Sargentville Notebook

Author	Mark Strand
ISBN	0679736689

Reasons for Moving was Mark Strand's first book, and on its publication in 1968 Donald Justice called him "maybe the very best of the new poets." Darker followed, and Robert Penn Warren said, "the moment is always exciting when a true poet finds the secret self that is the wellspring of his inspiration."...

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

Author	Stanley Kunitz
ISBN	0393329976

Throughout his life (1905-2006) Stanley Kunitz created poetry and tended gardens. This book is the distillation of conversations, none previously published, that took place between 2002 and 2004. Beginning with the garden, that "work of the imagination," the explorations journey through personal...

New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994

Author

Stephen Dunn

I like to immerse myself in an artist's work. It's always best to read three or four books by the same author at the same time. This way, one becomes comfortable with a particular vision or voice. Reading all of Charles Dickens or all of Jane Austen is thrilling because their worlds become yours, and for...

Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life

Author	Adam Feinstein
ISBN	1582345945

Adam Feinstein's book is the first English-language biography of the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Relating Neruda's remarkable life story and delving into the literary legacy of the man Gabriel Garcia Marquez called "the greatest poet of the twentiehth-century-in any language,"...

The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War

Author	Roy Morris Jr.
ISBN	0195124820

On May 26, 1863, Walt Whitman wrote to his mother: "O the sad, sad things I see--the noble young men with legs and arms taken off--the deaths--the sick weakness, sicker than death, that some endure, after amputations...just flickering alive, and O so deathly weak and sick." For nearly three years, Whitman...