Book of Questions

Rating:
Summary: Penetrating questions from a great poet/prophet
Review: "The Book of Questions" is a remarkable literary work which transcends genre. The book consists, very simply, of a series of rhetorical questions divided up among 74 untitled poems (each poem contains from 3 to 6 questions). In this bilingual volume, Pablo Neruda's Spanish text is accompanied on each page by William O'Daly's crisp English translation.

Neruda asks questions about a dizzying range of topics--the natural world, religion, literature, history, food, the technological world, language, time, truth, justice, perception, and even his own legacy. Some of his questions are funny, some are disturbing. But all are thought-provoking, and the best of them display Neruda's dazzling ability to use words in surprising and illuminating ways. Who but Neruda would ask, "And at whom does rice smile / with infinitely many white teeth?" (section XII).

Reading "The Book of Questions," I had the sensation of reading some strange work of scripture--the writings of a prophet who had transcended the normal boundaries of perception and who challenges us to do the same. Although Neruda's prophetic voice varies greatly in mood--sometimes angry, sometimes playful, sometimes melancholy--his mastery of his poetic instrument is consistent, and the breadth of his vision is amazing. He is one of those poets--like William Blake, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson--whose writings constitute a modern equivalent to the poetic legacy of Buddha, Lao-Tzu, or the author of Ecclesiastes.

It's impossible to pick out just a few questions with which to give the reader a full sense of the power of "the Book of Questions." This is a book which one can read at one breathless sitting; it is also a book that, like an inscrutable sage, invites us to return again and again. Neruda muses, "What did the tree learn from the earth / to be able to talk with the sky?" (section XLI); his words strike me as a text which, like that rich, primal earth, could also be a source of wisdom.

In section X, Neruda asks, "What will they say about my poetry / who never touched my blood?" I believe that those who read and ponder "The Book of Questions" will say that the poetry of Pablo Neruda is one of the great treasures of world literature.

Rating:
Summary: musings of a beautiful and original mind
Review: 316 questions posed by the great poet just months before his death. I found more than 70 of them worth copying into my journal, and I'm not particularly compulsive about things like that. Reading them, you will probably find yourself transported to an especially thoughtful and unusual frame of mind.

Here are some favorites:

Is it true that in an anthill, dreams are duty?
Am I allowed to ask my book whether it's true I wrote it?
Why did the grove undress itself only to wait for the snow?
You have room for some thorns? they asked the rose bush.
Where can you find a bell that will ring in your dreams?
Does the earth sing like a cricket in the music of the heavens?
And at whom does rice smile with infinitely many white teeth?
Will Czechoslovakians or turtles be born from your ashes?
In dreams, do plants blossom and their solemn fruit ripen?
And why does my skeleton pursue me if my soul has fallen away?
Isn't the city the great ocean of quaking mattresses?
What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?
What was awaiting me in Isla Negra? The green truth or decorum?

Rating:
Summary: musings of a beautiful and original mind
Review: 316 questions posed by the great poet just months before his death. I found more than 70 of them worth copying into my journal, and I'm not particularly compulsive about things like that. Reading them, you will probably find yourself transported to an especially thoughtful and unusual frame of mind.

Here are some favorites:

Is it true that in an anthill, dreams are duty?
Am I allowed to ask my book whether it's true I wrote it?
Why did the grove undress itself only to wait for the snow?
You have room for some thorns? they asked the rose bush.
Where can you find a bell that will ring in your dreams?
Does the earth sing like a cricket in the music of the heavens?
And at whom does rice smile with infinitely many white teeth?
Will Czechoslovakians or turtles be born from your ashes?
In dreams, do plants blossom and their solemn fruit ripen?
And why does my skeleton pursue me if my soul has fallen away?
Isn't the city the great ocean of quaking mattresses?
What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky?
What was awaiting me in Isla Negra? The green truth or decorum?

Rating:
Summary: A book for the ages
Review: I know I'll be returning to this book over and over throughout my entire life, even if it's only to read one question and let it perk for a day or longer. A question is a wonderful way to experience poetry: each question is a seed, that with time, can grow into something different and something great within each person that reads it.

This was among Pablo Neruda's last works. He left us with a great gift.

Rating:
Summary: A book for the ages
Review: I know I'll be returning to this book over and over throughout my entire life, even if it's only to read one question and let it perk for a day or longer. A question is a wonderful way to experience poetry: each question is a seed, that with time, can grow into something different and something great within each person that reads it.

This was among Pablo Neruda's last works. He left us with a great gift.

Rating:
Summary: Questions from the heart
Review: I taught middle school in the spring and used Neruda's poem about Hitler as a springboard for my students to create their own questions in poetry form. A wonderful way to inroduce a new style to students.

Rating:
Summary: The World Through Questions
Review: The BOOK OF QUESTIONS was written in 1973, a few months before Neruda's death to cancer. Troubled by the knowledge of his impending death, as well as by a U.S. backed coup threatening the Allende government in Chile (Leftist regime 1970-73), Neruda wrote several small books of brief poems, comprised simply of unanswerable questions, in the koan tradition (question/statement in the form of a paradox that disciples of Zen ponder). They are enigmatic, at times surreal, leaving you lost in labyrinths of deep thought, or in abstract bewilderment.

My favorite questions include:

Why do leaves commit suicide
When they feel yellow?

and

When the convict ponders the light
is it the same light that shines on you?

--ross saciuk