One of my favorite collections of poetry is Pablo Neruda’s 20 LOVE POEMS AND A SONG OF DESPAIR. Simple and precise, manages an amazing intimacy with seemingly little effort. Maybe I love it partly because of it’s singlemindedness, focused intensity on what it was trying to say. Each poem exhibiting a clarity of revelation. And I was young when I read it, when the discovery of poetry is almost as moving as the poetry itself. Because of this, perhaps my expectations for THE CAPTAIN’S VERSES were unfair. I can’t know, but here we are. THE CAPTAIN’S VERSES contains a handful of superlative poems {including YOUR LAUGHTER, IF YOU FORGET ME, LETTER ON THE ROAD} but also a sprinkle I just couldn’t latch on to, even after multiple starts, I simply resolved to look for a few lines of beauty. Not every voice can be heard, and that might be on me. I appreciate that Neruda is going for a broader spectrum—our love is not to be considered as an isolated thing but as part of the world we live in. Start with 20 LOVE POEMS and then drop by here. ( )

honestly i dnf'd this. i just don't care to slog through the last section of longer....poems? prose? idk call me a fake fan but there's only so many times i can read this man talk about his lover's breasts and how they remind him of his homeland. ( )

feels superficial.


"Neruda" is a strange movie, maybe worth a watch. ( )

I love Pablo Neruda, and I love his love poems - but this small collection was exhausting after a bit. The poems seem repetitious. It may just be the order they were put in, but none of them really shook me the way poems/collections of his have in the past. ( )

A typical Pablo Neruda collection, focusing on passionate love and making allusions to earthy stuff like bread, fire and grapes. I sound like a glib philistine writing that, but there's little to differentiate The Captain's Verses from other collections of his poetry. That's not a bad thing, because Neruda is a fine poet with a very clean and spare style. But there was little other than 'Your Laugh' which truly stood out for me. Indeed, reading this book I realised 'Your Laugh' was the first Neruda poem I ever read, when it was quoted by a Times editorial about the successful rescue of the 33 miners in the Chilean mining accident of 2010. It's peculiar the connections we make.

Favourites include: 'Your Feet', 'Your Laugh', 'My Infinity', 'The Well', 'Forgetting', 'Not Only Fire' and 'Dead Woman'. ( )