At the time of his death in Santiago in 1973, twelve days after the military coup, [Pablo Neruda] had just seen the fourth edition of his Obras completas through the press, he was nearing the completion of his memoirs (Confieso que he vivido), and was working on the last of eight volumes of new poetry [Larosa separado, Jardin de invierno, 2000, El corazón amarillo, Libro de las preguntas, Elegía, Defectos escogidos, and El mar y las campanas]. He had planned to publish these, along with his autobiography, on his seventieth birthday. Those eight collections make up a remarkable last chapter in the life of the most varied twentieth-century poet to have written in Spanish. Two of them—Jardin de invierno and El mar y las campanas—include some poems which rank among his finest. They represent the winter of his poetry, whose autumn had begun in 1958 with the...