Intimacies: Poems of Love by Pablo Neruda

For this fully bilingual book, a companion to On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea by Pablo Neruda, I paired a series of paintings called MUSE with a selection of Pablo Neruda’s poems, translated by Alastair Reid, which spoke to me of love. Not just desire, not just fleeting, passionate love, but lasting love—naked, exposed, vulnerable, and receptive to what life offers. These later of Neruda’s love poems of love touched me deeply, joyfully.

In a way, all of Neruda’s poems are love poems. He loved being alive and recorded his moments of joy and sorrow, beauty and despair, love in its many manifestations. To him love is an essential life-giving spark. In a word, intimacy.

See the related series: Muse Elements