All the Unread Shelves: The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda
Mark has accumulated many books. Unfortunately, he hasn’t read them yet. Each week, Mark will be read a book he hasn’t finished and offer his impressions.
Reading The Heights of Macchu Picchu is a lot like going for a walk at lunch and wandering into a distant and wild place. The language begins in a daze and eventually focuses as Pablo Neruda approaches his subject. The work is physical and grand, built of hands and lush categorical images. It’s a tribute to Neruda that his abstractions always seem specific. I’m most interested in the way Neruda uses spacing and form changes between cantos almost as you would expect to hear changes in a pop album. (Forgive the constant comparison to records, but I really believe an LP is the best modern yardstick for small books of poetry.) Is Neruda the Brian Wilson of Spanish poetry? Perhaps, though rather than defining his location, Neruda expands it into universal understanding. His Macchu Picchu is a place of ceremony, a place that speaks of collective physical experience and its organization through human thought. I’m likely to seek out more Neruda based on this work, as this book was much too short. And as a result, so is this response.