The Night in Isla Negra

Where it comes to reading, I go in spurts where I read almost no books and then where I always have one or even two going. Often one book leads to another-- sometimes in unexpected ways.

'In This We are Native' by Montana writer Annick Smith wasn't a memoir that I expected would lead me to a Chilean poet, but it did. (Poets and poetry enthusiasts, when you see who the poet is, please forgive me. I am not as widely educated in poetry as many.)

It was his house first but then the life that added to the poetry and made me look for more and more information on Pablo Neruda. To be honest I liked (Is like, such a mild word, adequate? Well, I cannot think of what might be better. Remember I am not the poet) his love poetry, but the poems about place, about his experiences, his soul experiences, they are why I went further in exploring who this man had been. What led to these poems?

Is place what helps create such poetry or are those, who would create that kind of art drawn to certain places by their energy? I am very land oriented. Houses come and go but where they are situated, that is something you cannot create. The setting comes first, but, wherever they are, I love to see the houses that creative people have created or in which they have lived. The houses tell so much more about them.

Neruda's house which he called Isla Negra, from where it is located on the Chilean coast with sand and rocks to look toward, was clearly one of those houses. Perfect setting, intriguing house with large windows, interesting rooms and a concept of making it part of the ground from which it arose. It did not detract but added to its surroundings.

If I had many lifetimes to live or maybe many homes, one would be on the ocean, overlooking an isolated stretch of beach with sand and rocks on a rugged coastline where the waves crash against those rocks and sometimes during a very big storm, you worry what else they will crash against. There are tame stretches of coastline (well most of the time, no ocean is tame all the time), but they have little appeal for me. Isla Negra, steeped in the power of the ocean, of nature, would.

Oh and might I add, I would be a gifted poet who could find words like those below to paint a picture of what I was experiencing. I realize the price for such insights is high but oh how words like these enrich, how they seem to give the reader something to suck into their being, think about, and then draw from themselves feelings they they would not have felt otherwise.

The Night in Isla Negra
Pablo Neruda

Ancient night and the unruly salt
beat at the walls of my house.
The shadow is all one, the sky
throbs now along with the ocean,
and sky and shadow erupt
in the crash of their vast conflict.
All night long they struggle;
nobody knows the name
of the harsh light that keeps slowly opening
like a languid fruit.
So on the coast comes to light,
out of seething shadow, the harsh dawn,
gnawed at by the moving salt,
swept clean by the mass of night,
bloodstained in its sea-washed crater.

Neruda's poetry is online, where I found the poem, at the link above under his name. Because the coast of Chile seems very much like Oregon's, I used one of my photos from May along Oregon's coast at the top. With a little search, I found these photos online of [Isla Negra]. Then I liked this article as it explained the draw that I felt when I began to look into who Pablo Neruda had been: [from the literary traveler].