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neiljung78's review
4.0
I struggled with this to start with - nearly abandoned it. But at a certain point, in the space of a few poems, the words sunk into me. There were still moments of the baggy vagueness that frustrated me. But there was more clarity, more self awareness and fellow feeling.
leaflibrary's review
3.0
Reading non love poems by Pablo Neruda makes me realize why literature favors those. His regular poems are all over the place, but the most bizarre ones were my favorites. For instance:
I was regularly moved to excitedly email friends with poems I read. Here's the first of those emails, written one restless spring day not long after I began the collection:
The book starts with Toward An Impure Poetry, which I've read before but is so great and reminds me of my favorite defiant Ferlinghetti stuff, like Junkman's Obbligato and [b:Poetry as Insurgent Art|807911|Poetry as Insurgent Art|Lawrence Ferlinghetti|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348648481s/807911.jpg|793853]. Then there are some clumsy early poems before the collection hits its stride with appropriately restless and mid-April ish works. There's one called Gentleman Alone that's so fun to read aloud! Try this part: "At long last, the petty employee, delivered from weekly routine, after bedding himself for the night with a novel, seduces his neighbor conclusively. They go on to a villainous movie." And these lonely lines: "All the twilight seducers, the nights of the wedded, close over like bed sheets and bury me..." Then there's a three-page ode to the author's legs while lying in bed, and man, it makes me weirdly giddy just reading it! And after that is the best one so far: Walking Around. As I said, a lot of the poems feel restless, melancholy, and vaguely manic, and I think those combined feelings fit spring really well. This one reminds me of one of my all time favorite literary passages (from [b:Steppenwolf|16631|Steppenwolf|Hermann Hesse|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389332672s/16631.jpg|57612] by Hermann Hesse):
The narrator of that paragraph longs to "commit outrages" in protest of "this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity." (Swoon.) I get the same sense from Walking Around. The author is tired of being a man, and yet he also has the sense that he hasn't lived as a man to his full, chaotic capacity. Relatable, right? Here's the poem as my book (and not the poetry website I just found) translates it:
Two feet
like a tangle of porcupines,
two half-opened fists,
two slovenly
cucumbers...
-You Flame Foot!
I was regularly moved to excitedly email friends with poems I read. Here's the first of those emails, written one restless spring day not long after I began the collection:
The book starts with Toward An Impure Poetry, which I've read before but is so great and reminds me of my favorite defiant Ferlinghetti stuff, like Junkman's Obbligato and [b:Poetry as Insurgent Art|807911|Poetry as Insurgent Art|Lawrence Ferlinghetti|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348648481s/807911.jpg|793853]. Then there are some clumsy early poems before the collection hits its stride with appropriately restless and mid-April ish works. There's one called Gentleman Alone that's so fun to read aloud! Try this part: "At long last, the petty employee, delivered from weekly routine, after bedding himself for the night with a novel, seduces his neighbor conclusively. They go on to a villainous movie." And these lonely lines: "All the twilight seducers, the nights of the wedded, close over like bed sheets and bury me..." Then there's a three-page ode to the author's legs while lying in bed, and man, it makes me weirdly giddy just reading it! And after that is the best one so far: Walking Around. As I said, a lot of the poems feel restless, melancholy, and vaguely manic, and I think those combined feelings fit spring really well. This one reminds me of one of my all time favorite literary passages (from [b:Steppenwolf|16631|Steppenwolf|Hermann Hesse|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389332672s/16631.jpg|57612] by Hermann Hesse):
"When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself..."
The narrator of that paragraph longs to "commit outrages" in protest of "this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity." (Swoon.) I get the same sense from Walking Around. The author is tired of being a man, and yet he also has the sense that he hasn't lived as a man to his full, chaotic capacity. Relatable, right? Here's the poem as my book (and not the poetry website I just found) translates it:
Walking Around
by Pablo Neruda
translated by Ben Belitt
It so happens I'm tired of just being a man.
I go to a movie, drop in at the tailor's - it so happens -
feeling wizened and numbed, like a big, woolly swan
awash in an ocean of clinkers and causes.
A whiff from a barbershop does it: I yell bloody murder.
All I ask is a little vacation from things: from boulders and woolens,
from gardens, institutional projects, merchandise,
eyeglasses, elevators - I'd rather not look at them.
It so happens I'm fed up - with my feet and my fingernails
and my hair and my shadow.
Being a man leaves me cold: that's how it is.
Still - it would be lovely
to wave a cut lily and panic a notary,
or finish a nun with a left to the ear.
It would be nice
just to walk down the street with a green switchblade handy,
whooping it up till I die of the shivers.
I won't live like this - like a root in a shadow,
wide-open and wondering, teeth chattering sleepily,
going down to the dripping entrails of the universe
absorbing things, taking things in, eating three square meals a day.
I've had all I'll take from catastrophe.
I won't have it this way, muddling though like a root or a grave,
all alone underground, in a morgue of cadavers,
cold as a stiff, dying of misery.
That's why Monday flares up like an oil-slick
when it sees me up close, with the face of a jailbird,
or squeaks like a broken-down wheel as it goes,
stepping hot-blooded into the night.
Something shoves me toward certain damp houses, into certain dark corners,
into hospitals, with bones flying out of the windows;
into shoe stores and shoemakers smelling of vinegar,
streets frightful as fissures laid open.
There, trussed to the doors of the houses I loathe
are the sulfurous birds, in a horror of tripes,
dental plates lost in a coffeepot,
mirrors
that must surely have wept with the nightmare and shame of it all;
and everywhere, poisons, umbrellas, and belly buttons.
I stroll unabashed, my eyes and my shoes
and my rage and oblivion.
I go on, crossing offices, retail orthopedics,
courtyards with laundry hung out on a wire:
the blouses and towels and the drawers newly washed,
slowly dribbling a slovenly tear.
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