Passions and Impressions

Book excerpt: Pablo Neruda is known first as a poet, but the prose pieces in this collection reflect the enormous hunger he demonstrated throughout his career for new modes of expression, new adventures, new challenges. Passions and Impressions is both a sequel to and an enlargement of Neruda's Memoirs, recording a lifetime of travel, of friendships and enmities, of exile and homecoming, of loss and discovery, and of history both public and personal. Above all, it is a testament to Neruda's love for Chile-for its citizens, its flora and fauna, its national identity. His abiding devotion pervades these notes on a life fully lived.