[Pablo Neruda's Isla Negra, A Notebook, was] written during 1962–63, and consists of about 202 pages of meditative, autobiographical poems. He seems to have written them "as a present to himself for his sixtieth birthday" (as Professor E. M. Santi observes in his Afterword). In this "present to himself," Neruda contemplates the various periods of his life, dividing the lyrical series into 5 sections: Where the Rain is Born, The Moon in the Labyrinth, Cruel Fire, The Hunter after Roots, and Critical Sonata. It is in the last of these, Critical Sonata, that the poet takes up the questions of his political belief, if not of his political acts in support of that belief, and suggests what he wanted to think of these matters himself, and what he expects the world to think of them. A man who writes such work as a present for his 60th birthday, a rather self-absorbed...