Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems brings together in English translation eight of the longer poems by Nicaragua’s impassioned Marxist priest, Ernesto Cardenal, described in the Times Literary Supplement as “the outstanding socially committed poet of his generation in Spanish America.” His work, like Pablo Neruda’s, is unabashedly political; like Ezra Pound’s, his poems demonstrate history on an epic scale––but the voice is all his own and speaks from the heart of a land sunk for generations in poverty, oppression, and turmoil.…

Apocalypse and Other Poems by Nicaragua’s revolutionist poet-priest, Ernesto Cardenal, is the author’s second book, the first of poetry, to be published by New Directions. The editors of this volume, Robert Pring-Mill and Donald D. Walsh, have chosen a representative selection of Cardenal’s shorter protest poems, epigrams, religious, and Amerindian verse. Also included are two of Cardenal’s most impressive longer works: the haunting and melodic elegy, “Coplas on the Death of Merton,” and the title poem, “Apocalypse,” in which the theme of an ever-threatening nuclear holocaust is the core of a modern rendering of the Book of Revelations.…

Neruda finished writing The Captain’s Verses in 1952 while in exile on the island of Capri — the paradisal setting (islands of Procida and Salina) of the Academy-Award-winning film Il Postino. Surrounded by the natural splendor of Capri, Neruda addressed these poems of love, ecstasy, devotion, and fury to his lover, Matilda Urrutia. Later the same year, Neruda published The Captain’s Verses anonymously in an edition of fifty copies, fourteen years before he and Matilde legally married.…

Charged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda’s love poems caused a scandal when published anonymously in 1952. In later editions, these verses became the most celebrated of the Noble Prize winner’s oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images that reveal in gentle lingering lines an erotic re-imagining of the world through the prism of a lover’s body: “today our bodies became vast, they grew to the edge of the world / and rolled melting / into a single drop / of wax or meteor….…

In 1936, Pablo Neruda was Chile’s consul in Madrid, and so horrified by the civil war and the murder of his friend, Federico García Lorca, that he started writing what became his most politically passionate series of poems, Spain in Our Hearts. The collection was printed by soldiers on the front lines of the war, and later incorporated into the third volume of Neruda’s revolutionary collection, Residence on Earth. This bilingual New Directions Bibelot edition presents Spain in Our Hearts as a single book as it was first published, a tribute to Neruda’s everlasting spirit.…

Residence on Earth (Residencia en la tierra) is widely regarded as Pablo Neruda’s most influential work, a tempestuous ocean that became “a revolution…a classic by which masterpieces are judged” (Review). “In Residence on Earth,” wrote Amado Alonso, “the tornado of fury will no longer pass without lingering, because it will be identified with Neruda’s heart.” Written in the span of two decades (1925-1945), beginning when Neruda was twenty-one, Residence on Earth was originally published in Spanish in three successive volumes (1933 1935, 1947), all available in this definitive bilingual edition.…

The work of the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal is widely read throughout Spanish America today. As a Catholic priest who is also a Marxist revolutionary, his sympathies and understanding span the polarities of popular sentiment, allowing him to view objectively what others, out of ignorance or self-interest, fear. In 1970, eleven years after Fidel Castro’s triumphant Revolution, Cardenal was invited to Havana by the House of the Americas, to sit on the poetry panel of its annual literary competition.…