When Pablo Neruda was exiled from Chile, South America didn’t lose a common laborer, a politician or a landowner.

It lost a poet — one who had the ability to break hearts and mend them again with just a few strokes of his pen.

The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, a compilation of the poet’s work — spanning from his earliest published work in 1920 to his most recent in 1973 — allows readers effortless access to the man behind the ink.

Including 33 published books, this Neruda translation allows for a side-by-side comparison of the original Spanish and translated English text.

And Neruda is powerful in either language. He evokes raw, human emotion through both his connection with the reader and his understanding of nature.

Neruda’s prose, especially that in his early work, embraces the natural world. In his descriptions of “solid marine madness,” “crosses of fire” and “belfry of fogs,” he delves into the more substantial world of life, sadness, elation and passion. He links basic human emotion to nature in its cyclical form — he reminds his readers they are part of a cycle, a piece of nature that can be neither altered nor stopped — only harnessed.

The first poem, “Love,” epitomizes Neruda’s style in both its title and prose:

“How I would love you, woman, how I wouldlove you, love you as no one ever did!Die and stilllove you more.And stilllove you more and more.”

Neruda, through his work, illustrates his enchantment with the human body — and especially the female form. Through images of hills he describes curves, through the moon — eyes, and through the sea — the soul.

His poem “Your Breast is Enough,” published in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, illuminates this enchantment.

“I have said that you sang in the windlike the pines and like the masts.Like them you are tall and taciturn,and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.”

These words, now renowned, originated in Chile.

In Isabel Allende’s novel The House of the Spirits, Neruda is referred to as “The Poet.” Upon his lap one of the characters sits, immersed in his words, stories and poems. And with these same words he influenced a country from which he was exiled and inspired hope in those who became oppressed by the Conservative Chilean regime.

However, from the first stanza of his first poem — imbued with love, an infatuation with nature and a tone of immortality, to the last lines of his final piece — somewhat desolate and fatigued, the reader is able to see his disenchantment with the very aspects he once embraced. As he aged, he seemed to forget the mystical and become absorbed in a pessimistic realism. And though his poems do not deny nature, his fascination waned.

And it shows.

But what is most amazing about Neruda’s work is that even though he allows his emotions to flow unhindered onto the page, though he lays out his greatest weaknesses for the public — enemies, admirers and lovers alike — he knows, and doesn’t allow his readers to forget, he is strong. He embraces his power — including the power to be weak.