Passions and Impressions

Passions and Impressions is a hit-and-miss collection of essays, historical profiles, poems and short stories — similar in form to his superior Memoirs. However, Neruda has enough moments of rich insight to make it a rewarding read:

It is worth one's while, at certain hours of the day or night, to scrutinize useful objects in repose: wheels that have rolled across long, dusty distances with their enormous load of crops or ore, charcoal sacks, barrels, baskets, the hafts and handles of carpenters' tools... Worn surfaces, the wear inflicted by human hands, the sometimes tragic, always pathetic, emanations from these objects give reality a magnetism that should not be scorned.

Our nebulous impurity can be perceived in them: the affinity for groups, the use and obsolescence of materials, the mark of a hand or a foot, the constancy of the human presence that permeates every surface. 

This is the poetry we are seeking.