A beautiful, thoughtful, deeply researched biography of Pablo Neruda.

Written after more than a decade of research, it follows Neruda from provincial Chile through literary celebrity, diplomatic appointments, exile, communism, the Spanish Civil War and the upheavals of twentieth-century Latin America, while continually returning to the poems as records of appetite, ambition, grief and ideological transformation. 

This is a really thorough attempt at seeing how a poet forms, and with respect. Neruda’s relationships with Whitman, Baudelaire and the European Romantics; sexuality and marriage; intoxicants and travel; his inevitable sense of conviction that poetry carried a public obligation. That also means the biography does not politely step around the uglier material in Neruda’s life, it's more to express and then understand how extraordinary imaginative generosity, political conviction, vanity, cruelty and desire could occupy the same person. 

Ecco / HarperCollins, New York, 2018. First edition, first printing. Hardcover with dust jacket. Light shelf wear to jacket, with minor rubbing and handling marks. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.