When our familiar Spanish poet Federico García Lorca presented his Chilean counterpart Pablo Neruda at the philosophical school in Madrid, he spoke of "an authentic poet, one of those who have cultivated their senses in a world that is not ours and that very few perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy; closer to pain than to intellect; closer to blood than to ink. He remains before the world full of sincere wonder and lacks those two elements with which so many false poets have lived: hatred and irony. When he attempts to be a punisher and raises the sword, he suddenly finds himself with a wounded dove between his fingers."

By 1935, when these words are believed to have been spoken, only three of the nineteen poems included in this collection had been written. So many years later, we could not find a more pertinent commentary for the other sixteen, as well as for Neruda's overall work. Shall we add the delirious root of love, which sprouts in the universe around us and within us in alliance with silence? But if the poems were voices, these would have the tone of passion, tenderness, and a sincerity that lays bare.