practical to the magical. Neruda animates the socks, almost to the point of personification. Note that he does not claim they are as soft as rabbit fur but rabbits themselves. Already, the poet pulls us out of the realm of the rational by suggesting that the socks live. As is the case with most Neruda poems, he keeps pushing:

I slipped my feet into them as though into two cases knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin. Violent socks, my feet were two fish made of wool, two long sharks sea-blue, shot through by one golden thread, two immense blackbirds, two cannons

Through these wild images and intense metaphors, Neruda makes his socks a kind of menagerie and a virtual arsenal. In the first part of the excerpt, we see Neruda linking the socks to magical treasure chests, woven chests, comprised of both real and metaphorical material. Then, with no warning, no explanation, the socks transform the poet's feet into various sea-creatures: woolly fish and blue sharks and back again to blackbirds. Students often want to attribute symbolic meaning to the rabbits or cases or fish or sharks or blackbirds; or they wonder if Neruda is referring to Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." There is no evidence in this poem or in Neruda's opus that he is working on a symbolic level here. It is important to note that these images are not symbols; they are metaphors. Again, symbols usually refer to something external, whereas a metaphor is an internal, non-logical fusing of two unlike ideas. When he claims that the socks have turned his feet into two cannons, he is probably not suggesting that his body is armed for political revolution, rather that his feet have been "armed" through their immersion in enchanted socks.

So incredible are the socks, that at first the poet's feet seem unworthy of the socks, their "woven fire." This bizarre and powerful image seems to connote layers of meaning, yet makes little sense on a rational level. What if fire were material, cloth, thread? What if you could weave a flame? Through this image, we get a sense of how warm the socks are through animation, not via simple description. Again, Neruda pushes how far he can take this motif. First, he likens the socks to fireflies, then birds. He wants to "put them / into a golden / cage'' and "give them / birdseed / and pieces of pink melon." Notice how far the poetic imagination has brought us from the opening lines of the poem, even from the first metaphor of the socks feeling like rabbits. What's interesting about these images and metaphors is that they do not necessarily have anything to do with each other. The poem does not have a controlling metaphor the way a Shakespearean sonnet or a poem by John Donne might. Neruda leaps back and forth from image to metaphor to reality, then back into the world of the illogical and the irrational, where, for him, poetry resides.

But, poetry also resides in the external world, and on some level, this poem is not only about socks but about poetry as well. To be more precise, the poem might be a plea to the reader to think of the world in more poetic terms. What "Ode to My Socks" does share with Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This Is Just to Say" is a belief that poetry exists everywhere. It exists in the most mundane, the most unnatural of places. It's simply a matter of looking at the world the way a poet does. Certainly, Maru Mori has knitted similar (even better) socks for other people who did not see them as rabbits but merely socks. Similarly, most people would not see the poetry in a red wheelbarrow or in frozen plums, but from the poetic perspective, poetry can happen anywhere. Thus, Neruda's poem continues its ekphrasistic energy because the world is art. Socks, books, watermelons, salt, clothes: all are art. Every object, every thing is a potential engagement with the artistic imagination. In the final stanza, Neruda tells us the theme of his poem: "The moral / of my ode is this: / beauty is twice beauty / and what is good is doubly / good / when it is a matter of two socks / made of wool / in winter.'' Notice how Neruda allots "good'' and "beauty'' their own lines, driving home the idea that beauty and goodness exist on the most "elemental'' levels.

In the middle of the poem, Neruda compares his desire to safeguard his socks with the way "learned men / collect / sacred texts." The textuality of this image is no coincidence. Here, the poet wants to make a palpable connection between the socks, books, and the holy. For Neruda, poetry is sacred as life is sacred. Life is poetry, and we should read and engage our lives (and our poetry) the way one reads and engages a sacred, holy text. In the poem, two knitted socks are the sacred texts that Neruda engages; for you, Neruda's poem is another.

Source: Dean Rader, in an essay for Literature of Developing Nations for Students, Gale, 2000. Rader has published widely in the field of twentieth-century poetry.

"Ode to My Socks'' is so simple and direct that it is hardly possible for a reader, even one not normally familiar with poetry, to not understand it from beginning to end. There are no subtle allusions, no poetic tricks, no metaphors that need unraveling here. The poet sings praise to a pair of woolen socks that he receives as a gift. The socks are beautiful, wondrous, celestial, and the poet is loathe to wear them because he feels he is not worthy of their grandeur. But he resists the temptation to hoard them, and he puts them on his feet to warm him against the cold. The poet then offers a short moral to his story. Each line and phrase of the poem is straightforward and presented in the rhythms of natural speech. It is poetry at its most basic: poetry as communication. In "The House of Odes," the opening poem in the collection Nuevas odas elementales, in which "Ode to My Socks" appears, Neruda makes very plain his intention with this and the rest of his "transparent'' odes:

I want everything to have a handle, I want everything to be a cup or a tool. I want people to enter a hardware store through the door of my odes.

I work at cutting newly hewn boards storing casks of honey arranging horseshoes, harness, forks: I want everyone to enter here, let them ask questions, ask for anything they want.

With these simple poems, Neruda says, he intends to offer something useful to the world. These verses are not mysterious or complicated, but solid and utilitarian as a cup or a fork; they are tools to be used. But this is not to forget, however, that they are, first and foremost, poems. How does Neruda hope that his poems are to be considered something useful? What practical function can poetry play? "Ode to My Socks" can be seen to be a paradigm example of a Nerudian ode, and an examination of it makes it clear how Neruda's ode functions as a "tool," or how utility for him is tied up with art and poetic expression.

On the most obvious level, the subject matter of "Ode to My Socks," as is the case with many of Neruda's odes, is something useful. In fact a pair of socks hardly seems like the sort of thing that one would praise in an ode because it isn't normally thought of as something other than useful. One doesn't think of socks apart from needing them to serve their function of clothing one's feet. But Neruda takes this staple object of daily existence (at least in the culture he is writing in) and describes it in such a way as to make it seem endowed almost with magical properties. As he celebrates his socks, this simple object of daily existence takes on a greater, deeper meaning. The reader is forced to look closely at something that ordinarily would be overlooked or ignored. Something that is taken for granted in everyday living becomes alive through the penetrating eye of the poet. It is worthwhile, the poem seems to say, to take a moment and consider carefully our material environment and the wonders in it. It is important to take notice of the beauty in things that serve human needs. Neruda's Marxist understanding of the material world as that which transforms human life is communicated in this poem that draws close attention to the wonder of a concrete, physical thing. Neruda says in a 1935 essay, "Toward an Impure Poetry," that this is in fact what he wants his poetry to do:

It is well, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coalbins, barrels and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all harassed lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

The poem, then, is a useful tool as it reminds readers of the often forgotten presence and significance of the material world.

The idea of usefulness is also one of the central themes of the poems. The poetic voice of "Ode to My Socks" begins by explaining that he received these socks from Maru Mori, which she knitted with her own hands. The socks are the direct product of someone's intimate labor. The poet says he slipped them onto his feet as if into two jewel cases that have been woven with dusk and sheep's wool. He goes on to describe how wondrous these seemingly simple socks are. They transform his feet into two woolen fish, two lapis blue sharks woven with golden thread, two blackbirds. They are so beautiful that his feet seem unacceptable to him; he fears they diminish the glow of the socks. But yet he realizes that these socks must be used and worn. He resists the urge to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies or scholars hoard rare books, and resolves to wear them. He feels remorse that he must surrender these beautiful objects to his use, and feels guilty at the bodily pleasure he gets from wearing them. But, resolutely sticking out his feet, he does so.

The poet recognizes that the socks are not socks unless they are worn, and so, despite his guilt at sullying this beautiful creation, he puts them on. In the early part of the poem, the socks transform the poet's feet, making them into all manner of fantastic objects. But it is also his feet that transform the socks and turn them into these marvelous things. Art and utility are not two separate things, but inform each other somehow. Using the socks is what makes them the beautiful creations that they are. And using them is what makes them useful; a tool is not a tool unless it is used. The poet knows not to hoard the socks as schoolboys keep fireflies in glass bottles, for to do so would be to prevent them from serving their function. The firefly no longer shines when trapped in a bottle without air; books hoarded by scholars and not read and enjoyed by the rest of the world are lifeless. Similarly, socks that will not be worn are of no worth. Objects need to fulfill their purpose to truly be those objects. The poem, then, seems to offer the reader an exploration of the relationship between art and usefulness.

"Ode to My Socks'' is also a useful poem, a tool in its own right, because it has a clear didactic purpose. It offers a lesson to help the reader understand a practical problem. The ode presents a story of the poet's socks, his admiration of them, his ambivalence about wearing them, and then offers a clear moral at the end. The moral is that beauty and goodness are twice as beautiful and good when it comes to two woolen socks in wintertime. This moral reinforces the idea that the socks are both beautiful and useful, that they have a dual function of providing aesthetic pleasure and utility. The handsome woolen socks serve the very important function of warming the poet's feet in wintertime. And the poem has the function of explaining the lesson to be learned from the poet's ruminations about his splendid socks.

The ode, as seen thus far, is useful on several levels: it celebrates a useful object, it alerts the reader to the wonder of the material world, it explores the idea of the relationship between art and utility, and it serves a didactic function to explain with its moral that beauty and utility are united. The poem is also useful on a more general level. It is useful in that it is simple and can be easily understood. And because it is useful, it in fact reinforces its power and purpose as art and as poetry.

Neruda turned to the form of the ode after living abroad for many years and being involved in diplomatic, political, and literary activities. He was a committed communist, and most of his poetry written between 1936 and 1952 is clearly political. From his early days as a student activist and poet, Neruda envisioned himself as a voice of the people, as someone who would speak for those who could not speak for themselves. But much of his early poetry, even though it is written in his direct realistic style, is accessible only to a relatively sophisticated audience. Neruda uses a great many hermetic images and shifting perspectives, which makes much of his earlier poetry difficult reading for the unschooled reader. With the odes, however, poetry serves its elemental function as a means of communication. This is poetry—simple, direct, uncomplicated—that reaches all people. It speaks in the voice of those to whom Neruda all his life sought to speak for and to. Thus with the simple odes Neruda's poetry finally serves the function he meant it to throughout his career—to speak to the everyday concerns of the simple people of Chile.

Thus Neruda's ode is useful in the same way as the pair of socks in "Ode to My Socks'' is useful. The ode is a tool of communication that only becomes a true tool—and a true work of art—once it is used. Poetry is not poetry when it fails to reach people because it is obscure or difficult or arcane; it becomes poetry not from being hoarded by scholars who understand it with erudition, or by being held up as an object of admiration, or by gathering dust on a bookshelf. Rather it becomes poetry by being read and understood—by being usable and by being used. With odes like "Ode to My Socks,'' Neruda' s poetry fulfills its intended purpose. This is a poem that can be read and understood by all people, that speaks in a voice that all can hear. With these poems, Neruda has produced beautiful and delicate works of art that are no less poetic or beautiful for their simplicity, but whose aesthetic delight is enhanced and extended by their utility.

Source: Uma Kukathas, in an essay for Literature of Developing Nations for Students, Gale, 2000. Kukathas is a freelance writer and a student in the Ph.D. program in philosophy at the University of Washington, where she specializes in social, political, and moral philosophy.

Pity the poets of the New World. If Columbus et al. merely had to subdue the native flora and fauna long enough to set up shop here, the poets had to describe it all. They were stuck with the languages of the Old World—English, Spanish, French, Portuguese—but the literary traditions made about as much sense as a court ball at a trading post. No wonder many of them fell back on the hoariest text of all, the Bible, for a sense of the poet's role. The myth of Adam naming the creatures in the Garden was perfect for a world their languages had not yet touched. Not only did it simplify the task—if you don't know what to call this plant, river or group of people, make it up—it gave the poet a combination of innocence and importance that was hard to resist. In this country that vision ended with the closing of the frontier—Walt Whitman is the last successful exemplar—but it survived longer in Latin America. Describing South America in an interview published in Robert Bly's Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (Beacon, 1971), Pablo Neruda noted "rivers which have no names, trees which nobody knows, and birds which nobody has described. . . . Everything we know is new." The poet's task, as he put is, is "to embrace the world around you, to discover the new world."

The Adamic poet, like his namesake, has a problem: If everything is new and you're the only one who determines what's what, how do you keep your pride at bay, and how do you know when to stop? Both Whitman and Neruda had enormous egos, and neither showed much restraint in output. Because Neruda wrote so much, including weak poems in almost all his more than forty books, it's advisable to start reading him in an edition of selected poems. The best of these, with translations by Anthony Kerrigan, W.S. Merwin, Alastair Reid and Nathaniel Tarn, has recently been reissued by Houghton Mifflin. The two new translations published by the University of California Press, Jack Schmitt's version of Canto General and Margaret Sayers Peden's Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda, provide a closer look at the poet's work of the 1940s and 1950s—both its glories and its excesses. This was a pivotal period for Neruda—the culmination of one phase of his career and the beginning of another—and these books are important additions to the body of work available in English translation.

With Neruda it's impossible to separate the poetry from the life. Both are huge, protean in their variety and ultimately political. Neruda, of course, has a sentimental appeal for anyone on the left. His commitment to the socialist cause and his death in the wake of the U.S.-sponsored Chilean coup can make him seem a literary martyr. But Neruda is more complex than this. While a single presence—expansive, passionate, directly personal—lies behind all his work, his career is marked by distinct changes in style and focus. The Adamic voice and political awareness we associate with him today are not strong elements in his early work. The volume that made him famous at 20, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), is a hybrid of French Symbolist yearning for the ineffable, and earthy Latin American eroticism. In the two major books that followed, Residence on Earth I (1933) and II (1935), Neruda turned from a young love poet into a surrealist, capturing the alienation he felt as a diplomat in the Far East in bleak monologues with long, fluid lines and torrents of imagery. The end of this period of surreal despair came in the mid-thirties when Neruda was serving in the Chilean Embassy in Madrid. His firsthand encounter with fascism during the Spanish Civil War solidified the basic commitment to the left that infuses all his subsequent work. In 1945 he was elected senator in the Chilean legislature; that same year he joined the Communist Party.

Canto General (1950) is the flowering of Neruda's new political stance. This epic collection traces the history of Latin America from before the arrival of human beings, through pre-Columbian times, colonization, liberation from the European powers, and the Yankee imperialism of the twentieth century. Much of it was written while the poet was on the run from the dictator Gabriel Gonzalez Videla; Neruda escaped into exile in 1949. When he returned to Chile after Gonzalez Videla's government fell, Neruda transformed his poetry yet again, developing a shortlined, deliberately "simple" mode of looking at everyday things in three volumes of Elemental Odes (1954-57). Though he wrote in a variety of styles after the odes, there is a general unity of tone in the poems of his last twenty years. The confidence and openness of this work reflect the richness of the poet's life: his travels all over the world; his broad recognition, capped by the Nobel Prize in 1971; his wealth of friends, including Salvador Allende, who named him Ambassador to France; his domestic life at homes in Santiago, Valparaiso and the coastal village of Isla Negra, where Neruda had a rambling house full of everything he had collected over the years. The autumnal abundance of this period ended with Pinochet's seizure of power in 1973. Gravely ill with cancer, Neruda survived for eleven days after the coup, chronicling in his memoirs the murder of Allende and the destruction of the country he loved. After his death, soldiers ransacked his houses.

Written when Neruda was in his 40s, Canto General stands at the center of the poet's life and work. Jack Schmitt's translation—the first complete English version—gives us Neruda at his most Adamic and most overtly political. In this collection the poet's task is not only to name the geographic features and forms of life in Latin America but to examine this garden after the Fall, as it moves through history in the flawed human world of hope and exploitation. Canto General is a huge work, including some 300 poems collected in fifteen sections. The first half of the book is broadly chronological, with five sections extending from pre-Columbian times to the year before the book was published. The second half is a group of ten varied sections tracing Neruda's encounters with nature, recent history, people and himself. The kinds of work Neruda brings together in Canto General—verse letters to friends, satiric blasts, lists, chronicles, elegies, descriptions, autobiographical musings, exhortations, lyric interludes—show his astounding poetic fertility. What unifies this diverse material is his focus on the question of justice. On one level, all the poems are exhibits in a vast historical trial.

The main defendant in this trial is Gonzalez Videla, the leftist turned reactionary who ordered Neruda's arrest after the poet denounced him in 1948. A triggering device for the poet's rage, Gonzalez Videla gets more attention than other dictators in the book, but finally he is seen as just another lackey of twentieth-century imperialism, one of many Neruda attacks in the fifth section of Canto General, "The Sand Betrayed." Our old friends Trujillo and Somoza crop up in this group as "voracious hyenas," as Neruda calls them. Their brutality in the service of corporations like Standard Oil, the United Fruit Company and Anaconda Copper (each given its own skewering) echoes that of the conquistadors Neruda describes in the third section of his epic: the same pretext of respectability; the same official blessings, from U.S. presidents now rather than bishops; the same cruelty toward the populace; the same underlying drive for power and wealth. As Neruda traces the history of Latin America in the first half of Canto General, he sets up a basic alternating pattern of a just world and its destruction. The pre-Columbian harmony of people and nature celebrated in the beautiful opening section, "A Lamp on Earth," is shattered by the Europen conquerors, then partially restored in a new form by the nineteenth-century liberators, then lost again in the neocolonialism of our time.

This pattern is fairly accurate, but it does raise two problems for the poet. The most obvious is repetition: Neruda's exhaustive catalogue of conquistadors, liberators and twentieth-century caudillos can at times become exhausting. The villains in particular tend to blur into one mass—which is obviously part of Neruda's point but nonetheless somewhat soporific. Some of my reaction may stem from general gringo ignorance of the intricacies of Latin American history—I confess I perked up when I saw Harry Truman come in for it in "Puerto Rico" or read about "Wall Street heroes" in "Sandino (1926)." Nonetheless, there are so many narratives of conquest and betrayal in the first 200 pages of Canto General that the various atrocities can begin to lose their punch. Neruda's tendency to slip into purple passages in some of the longer poems adds to this overstuffed quality.

The second problem is simplification. Again, Neruda's basic point is simple—there are good guys and bad guys in the history of Latin America—but sometimes the language is not lively enough to flesh out particular virtues and vices, and the figures end up as stereotypes. This happens most often when the poet is telling a story—narrative is generally the weakest element in Canto General. When Neruda abandoned his melancholy surrealism of the 1930s for the politically committed work that was to follow, he gave up some of the surprise and complexity that his plunges into the irrational had provided. Straight historical narrative doesn't always give him the oomph he needs to get his characters off the page. Fortunately, Neruda's restless technical inventiveness leads him to do more than just recount incidents, and many poems bring figures to life in bursts of sheer poetic energy, like the wacky run-on ironies at the start of "Miranda Dies in the Fog (1816)"—

If you enter Europe late dressed in top hat in the garden decorated by more than one Autumn beside the marble fountain while leaves of tattered gold fall on the Empire—

or the pounding list of accomplishments that defines the Araucanian Indian leader Lautaro in "The Chiefs Training'':

He drank wild blood on the trails. He wrested treasure from the waves. He loomed like a menacing god. He ate in every kitchen of his people. He learned the lightning's alphabet. He scented out the scattered ashes. He cloaked his heart with black furs. He deciphered the smoke's spiraling plume.

Neruda's masterpiece in Canto General is its second section, "The Heights of Macchu Picchu.'' In this exquisitely paced group of a dozen poems occasioned by his visit to the ruins of the Inca citadel in 1943, Neruda finds the heart of his vision. Beginning the sequence in alienated wandering "from air to air, like an/empty net,'' he concludes in a convincing solidarity with nameless exploited workers throughout history—"Juan Stonecutter," "Juan Coldeater," "Juan Barefoot"—who will "speak through my words and my blood." The Adamic impulse here is fundamentally political, a matter of standing up for those whom history has buried, of naming crimes. The city of Macchu Picchu is central to the sequence, but not in the ways we might expect. Neruda doesn't praise it as a symbol of pre-Columbian grandeur or even as a prototype of state socialism. Rather, the ruins serve as a locus for questions about basic human activities: work, survival in nature, community life. The stark majesty of this "towering reef of the human dawn" leads Neruda back to find its origins in punishing labor enforced by hunger and cold:

Macchu Picchu, did you put stone upon stone and, at the base, tatters? Coal upon coal and, at the bottom, tears?

The deserted city has become "a life of stone after so many lives." In his struggle to name those lives and define their meaning, Neruda develops a profound meditation on the glory and horror of human achievement.

Moving away from the history of Latin America, the last ten sections of Canto General are more personal in their approach. We see more of Neruda's life in the second half: his relations with friends in the rambling letter poems of "The Rivers of Song''; his years as a senator from the poor mining provinces of northern Chile in "The Flowers of Punitaqui"; and his days underground in "The Fugitive,'' which includes one of his finest descriptive passages in this evocation of a poor quarter of Valparaiso:

the high hills brimming with lives, doors painted turquoise, scarlet and pink, toothless steps, clusters of poor doors, dilapidated dwellings, fog, mist extending its nets of salt over things, desperate trees clinging to the ravines, clothes hanging from the arms of inhuman hovels, the hoarse whistle, abrupt creature of the vessels, the sound of brine, of the fog, the sea voice, made of strokes and murmurs.

It's not just the eye for sensory detail and the wealth of metaphor that dazzle here—readers of Neruda come to take these for granted—but the careful modulation that braids together houses, hills and sea fog as the images wind down the page. Topography, weather, social and economic conditions—Neruda catches the very texture of life in this district.

Other sections are less autobiographical, like Neruda's hymn and warning to the United States, "Let the Woodcutter Awaken," or the dramatic monologues of "The Earth's Name Is Juan," a poetic documentary on the struggles of Chilean workers. In "America, I Do Not Invoke Your Name in Vain," Neruda takes on what might seem an unlikely mode for such an expansive poet: the lyric glimpse of one moment. Averaging a dozen short lines and often just one sentence long, these poems include some of the book's most haunting endings, as in "Youth"—"all adolescence becoming wet and burning/like a lantern tipped in the rain"—or "Hunger in the South":

and just the winter cough, a horse moving through black water, where a eucalyptus leaf has fallen a dead knife.

The last two sections of Canto General wrap up Neruda's vast project with meditations on nature and death in "The Great Ocean'' and a final grounding of his political vision in personal experience in "I Am." Nothing in Neruda is neat, but these two final units give a sense of closure like that in one of the bulkier Dickens novels: a kind of summary and goodbye that leaves you with a huge social canvas—eccentric, flawed in spots, but rich with imagination and human sympathy.

The sheer heft of Canto General makes me admire Jack Schmitt for his diligence. The literalness of his translation is both its virtue and its limit. While you never feel the need to have the Spanish on facing pages to check if Neruda really said that, Schmitt's texts don't always work well as poems in English. He has a tendency to rely on Latinate cognates, lending a certain abstract quality to the work, as in the opening lines of "The Great Ocean'':

Ocean, if I could destine my hands a measure, a fruit, a ferment of your gifts and destructions, I'd choose your distant repose, your steely lines, your extension guarded by air and night.

In translations from Romance languages the choice of whether to use a cognate or a different word that would avoid abstract overtones is a judgment call on any given line, but Schmitt's general procedure gives us a fairly Latinate and hence somewhat less physical Neruda. Great translations of a body of poetry—Richard Howard's Baudelaire, for example, or Stephen Mitchell's Rilke—reflect not only an affinity between translator and poet but a distinctive mastery of the original text, a transformation of the work into the translator's personal idiom. I wish Schmitt had seized Neruda in this way a little more. Though more accurate on a literal level, his translation of "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" lacks some of the flamboyant energy of Nathaniel Tarn's; and his versions of "Gold," "The Ships" and other individual poems are less lyrical than Anthony Kerrigan's. But Schmitt has produced a consistent, readable version of the entire Canto General, and this is a major achievement.

Margaret Sayers Peden's task is less monumental than Jack Schmitt's. Her Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda translates sixty-seven of the nearly 200 "elemental odes" Neruda collected in three major books of the 1950s. I suspect anyone familiar with the odes will find that Sayers Peden has left out a few favorites. I'd love to see a version of "Ode to the Potato," for instance, with its effortless movement from names for the food (South American papa versus Castilian patata), through its role in history, to the way it sings in a frying pan; or "Ode to Copper," which shows the human dimension behind the schoolbook concept of "natural resources." But Sayers Peden's collection is nonetheless rich and representative. Her translations bring out the sensuous quality of Neruda's odes well; there is little of the Latinate or abstract here. Neruda's distinctive tone in these poems—casual, self-conscious but direct, musing yet open to passion—is captured with great sensitivity. My only quibble is with Sayers Peden's enjambment. In these shortlined poems Neruda will occasionally use the line break to separate an article from a noun or a preposition from its phrase. But the translation does this about twice as often as the original, and the effect is to make some poems a bit less fluid in their movement than they might be.

After the bulk and stridency of Canto General, the odes give an immediate impression of ease. The drive to document oppression that pushes out the fairly blocky lines of Canto General and the fierce rhetoric that often accompanies it are replaced by skinny texts that lope down the page: speculative, funny at times, seemingly open to anything. The Adamic impulse has modulated. The odes are as expansive as Canto General, but Neruda is naming material things now rather than patterns in history. Instead of reaching for the "general'' or universal, he turns to the basic, the "elemental.'' These poems have their designs on the reader—what work doesn't?—but they are deliberately user-friendly. As he puts it in "The House of Odes'':

I want everything to have a handle, I want everything to be a cup or a tool. I want people to enter a hardware store through the door of my odes.

Neruda's hardware store is not one of those spread-out franchises in a shopping plaza but the mom-and-pop operation squeezed into an urban lot that just happens to have everything you might ever need. And Neruda walks along with you as you browse, pointing out this and that, telling anecdotes, passing along a broad enthusiasm for everything that catches his eye. This is lively, accessible poetry. The odes combine a detailed specificity with an encyclopedic range of subjects: artichokes, atoms, chestnuts, his clothes—in the Spanish books Neruda even arranges them alphabetically. The danger in such abundance, of course, is prolixity. Neruda published three volumes of odes between 1954 and 1957, and the third collection shows him starting to run out of steam, with more passages that seem pulled directly from mere journal entries, more random meditations. And while the open-ended quality of these poems gives a sense of freedom and the possibility of surprise, the later odes occasionally fall back on vague moralizing to wrap things up, as at the end of "Ode to the Gentle Bricklayer": "Ah, what a lesson/I learned/from the gentle bricklayer!"

If there are a few duds in Sayers Peden's selection, her book also contains some of the best poems Neruda ever wrote. The ode format and the proposition of celebrating all elemental things clearly invigorated his work after the completion of Canto General. "Ode to a Watch in the Night'' is among his most sensuous love poems, with a hushed richness of sound in both original and translation:

A leaf falls, a droplet on the ground deadens the sound, the forest sleeps, waters, meadows, bells, eyes.

The pacing here and in other odes is masterful. Lines this short could easily ossify into predictability, but Neruda keeps them flexible by varying the line breaks and the syntax of phrases that run over them. At times his movement is light and rapid, a half-dozen lines for a single phrase. "Ode to Summer," "Ode to My Socks'' and other take a kind of glee in this. Insouciant, almost occasional, they romp down the page. Elsewhere there's a more deliberate pace as Neruda keeps a single object in view, naming it with image after image. In "Ode to the Cranium'' he describes his skull after a fall as "the one thing/sound as a walnut,'' invoking it in a list of metaphors:

boned tower of thought, tough coconut, calcium dome protecting the clockworks, thick wall guarding treasures infinitesimal.

The combination of delight in abundance, curiosity and bemused self-mockery is typical of Neruda's tone in these engaging poems.

From the start of his career, Neruda was a poet of the senses, but in the odes he is at his most direct. Everything has not only a sound and a color but a smell, a taste, a texture, sometimes in startling combinations. In "Ode to the Birds of Chile," ocean light is "acid," parrots "metallic," the southern swan a "ship/of silver/a mourning velvet." There is enough vibrant writing about food and drink in these poems to arouse the most jaded gourmet. Like great recipes, Neruda's odes to the lemon, tomatoes, wine, salt and maize unlock the possibilities in what might have seemed mundane. "Ode to Conger Chowder" actually is a recipe, with the poet inviting us to skin the eel, "caress/that precious/ivory'' of garlic before tossing it in the pot, and savor the final product of this Chilean specialty so "that in this dish/you may know heaven."

The grace and humor of these food poems make them a real delight, but they are more than rich confections. As an "elemental'' act, eating—along with working—is at the center of Neruda's political vision in the odes. In "Ode to Maize'' he delves into the history of this most basic American crop, setting its promise of mass nutrition against the reality of inequality and hunger. When he looks at salt, the first thing he thinks about is the salt miner. For Neruda food and other pleasures are our birthright—not as gifts from the earth or heaven but as the products of human labor. As they celebrate the sheer wonder of being alive, the odes lead us back to origins. They are the clearest—and surely the most inviting—illustrations of Marxist materialism I know.

Neruda was a poetic Antaeus, constantly rejuvenated by making contact with the ground. The odes and Canto General draw their strength from a commitment to nameless workers—the men in the salt mines, the builders of Macchu Picchu—and the fundamental value of their labor. This is all very Old Left, of course. As the statues topple in the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, it may seem anachronistic to read what a faithful Communist had to say about Latin America and the world as a whole. But the collapse of the Second World hasn't ended the problems of the Third. If anything, it should make the pattern of oppression in Latin America—and the heavy hand of the colossus to the north in supporting it—even more clear. Canto General is an excellent corrective to the self-congratulatory versions of history we are hearing these days. The odes take us back to the elemental facts behind history. Both books are radical in the best sense of the term. They ask questions that get to the root of the matter: Where do things come from? Who suffers and who doesn't? Why?

Source: Don Bogen, ‘‘Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda,’’ (book review) in The Nation, Vol. 254, No. 3, January 27, 1992, p. 95.