A bilingual collection of Neruda's poems mostly written when Neruda was a self-exiled diplomat in isolated regions of South Asia. A vortex of time, of loneliness, cycles of the natural world, decay, destruction, silence, resurrection; of luminous solitude, blue oblivion, and of such deep melancholy that at one time Neruda considered renouncing the whole book and withdrawing it from circulation; of the erotic night, love's impulse, and memory's persistence; of odes to Lorca and lovers, elegies, songs, sonatas, and barcaroles; of the magnificent series of poems, Spain in our Hearts, that Republican soldiers of the Spanish Civil War printed at the eastern front; of sea waves, landslides, jellyfish and a planet of swords. --From publisher description.