Saunders teaches writing and literature in the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina area and has published six chapbooks of poetry. In the following essay, Saunders contends that "Tonight I Can Write" is a powerful lament for a lost lover that gains strength because of Pablo Neruda's ability to control his vivid imagination and express his turbulent emotional state with the utmost sincerity, simplicity, honesty, and directness.

Pablo Neruda's "Puedo Escribir Los Versos" ("Tonight I Can Write") has long stood the test of time as arguably the best poem in Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) (1924), which has been called "one of the finest books of verse in the Spanish language." For English readers, moreover, the 1969 translation of this poem by W. S. Merwin, one of America's foremost poet-translators of the past fifty years, comes as an added boon...