Facing Winter

Winter Garden by Pablo Neruda

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A pensive collection as Neruda faces the Winter Garden of his dying. These elegiac poems sing with the imagery of nature and the lyrical voice of one of the 20th Century’s greatest poets as he faces the termination of his light. He addresses his literal last homecoming from France where he serves his native Chile, and a figurative homecoming as his “single journal” of life returns to the silence from which it came:

I am a man of so many homecomings
that form a cluster of betrayals,
and again, I leave on a frightening voyage
in which I travel and never arrive anywhere:
my single journey is a homecoming.





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