Unpublished Neruda Poems Showcase Last Love

AFP has the story about Pablo Neruda's last love.

From the story...

A series of unpublished poems by Chile's late Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel prize for literature, are shedding light on his last romance with his wife's niece more than 40 years his junior, a collector said.

The 14 poems were found in a book titled "Black Island Album," named after the house in central Chile which Neruda, his third and last wife Matilde Urrutia and her niece Alicia Urrutia shared, according to Nurieldin Hermosilla.

The lawyer and Neruda collector said he bought the book recently from a book dealer, who in turn had acquired it from an anonymous seller.

The poems are handwritten in Neruda's traditional green ink and are "a direct and definitive confirmation from the poet's own pen of his love for Alicia," Hermosilla said.

I could go on and on about how great Pablo Neruda is. He is, for me, without a doubt, the best poet I've read thus far in my short life. He's most well-known for his love poems, thanks in no small part to the wonderful Italian movie Il Postino , well worth watching if you haven't already.

Though I can't choose just one best love poem of his, I'll give you this:

Sonnet LXXXI

And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray
wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.