Lawrence Ferlinghetti Books

Gorgeous work. Neruda is my all time favorite. A beautiful book to give as a gift or to get some started with Neruda.

M.Eisner has compiled an elegant presentation of the profound Pablo's soulful echo. The translations are smooth and majestic. He has clearly discovered the light radiating from Neruda's heart. Thank you for this lovely red poppy edition!

"I became saturated with his poetry and began to translate his poems. Although there were many beautiful existing translations, many others did not flow as I felt they should and I often had interpretive differences with them." ~ Mark Eisner, translator

"The Essential Neruda Selected Poems" is the best translation I've read so far. The words are alive with beauty in a way that feels authentic to the heart. You can immerse yourself in the poems and emerge with a sense of wonder.

"Leaning into the evenings I throw my sad nets
to your ocean eyes."

Mark Eisner has captured the soul of Pablo Neruda's art and perhaps even enhanced the creative majesty of each poem. At times the poems can make you feel a little breathless as if you have happened upon a new discovery or secret revelation.

"And the air came in with orange-blossom fingers
over all those asleep:
a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,
of blue wind, of iron cordillera,
that were like soft hurricanes of footsteps
polishing the lonely boundary of the stone."

The imagery is at times so vivid, as if you were transported to each scene. Pictures flash across your mind and you can almost catch the scent of the ocean or see the colors vivid and pure. Angels and death dance through the poems with equal ease and at times the words are heavenly or earthy and dark.

"Full woman, carnal apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure clarity opens between your columns?
What ancient night does man touch with his senses?"

If you are new to the poems of Pablo Neruda then this would be an excellent place to start. The poems present many facets of the poet unlike other books that simply reveal his romantic nature. While I seem to enjoy his love poems best, I can say that this experience gives a more wide-ranging portrait of Pablo Neruda.

~The Rebecca Review

This would be my first introduction to Pablo Neruda, and I must say I'm a bit disappointed. Not that Neruda isn't a great poet, the Nobel Prize and critical acclaim prove the contrary, but perhaps the translation could use some more work.

I picked this copy up noticing the name of Robert Hass', the translator and author of the Essential Haiku, on which he did a great job. Unfortunately, Eisner is the editor of the majority of the poems. The analogy to Eisner's translation would be like what Zondervan did to the bible in their NIV. It's not a bad translation, but it's moderned up a bit. I would have appreciated a more King James-like translation of Neruda's poems as I could infer a lot of missed nuances that appear to be in the original Spanish on the opposite page. A lot of the translations lack the depth and texture of what a great poet should have, and sometimes it feels like I'm reading a different poet altogether.

For instance, a line "Hermano, hermano!" is translated as "Hermano, hermano!" in the English, though it could have plainly been have translated as "Brother, brother!" considering the second "hermano" is not capitalized. Perhaps this was Neruda's original intent, but there is no way to tell as there are no footnotes.

Poetry is about texture, a poet's voice, and brilliance in how the artist uses his words to paint; this translation doesn't do enough to convey the voice of Neruda, but merely makes it accessible to new readers of not only Neruda, but also poetry.

Neruda has given us some of the most incredibly poignant poetry of our time. Do yourself a favor; buy this collection.

Love on your mind? Read TWENTY LOVE POEMS: 15 --- "I like it when you're quiet."



"I like it when you're quiet. It's as if you weren't here now, and you heard me from a distance, and my voice couldn't reach you.

It's as if your eyes had flown away from you, as if your mouth were closed because I leaned to kiss you."

The title of the collection says it all "The Essential Neruda."

Here are four in-depth conversations, most centering on art and politics, published in 2001. Considering the tidal wave of events since then, it's astounding how these interviews still resonate with contemporary issues. Depending on your point of view you'll find Rollins, Biafra, and to a certain extent Billy Childish, insightful or exasperating in their politics, but its hard to miss the passion in their arguments. Ferlinghetti, by far, takes the longest view of events past and present, and suggests solutions (some new, some old), sounding the most conservative by comparison. Many will consider these four exchanges as nothing more than preaching to the already converted, but in this political season they take on the character of voices crying in the wilderness.

Wow. This collection of interviews is amazing. Though I had heard very little about any of these men when I picked the book up, I found their words very interesting. Even where I disagreed with their messages, they caused me to think about why I disagree. Many times I felt like putting down the book and going out to either create or protest. Even though all four of these men are politically active and radical, they each provide very different perspectives that, when presented together, have much more power than they could on their own. I recommend this book for anyone in search of inspiration to question and act.

I've been familiar with Biafra/Rollins/Childish and Ferlinghetti for a long time, but can't say I'm a huge fan of any of the four, but in reading through these interviews, I have a whole new respect for all of them. Vale talks about so many issues of political importance, artistic integrity, life, and everything with them. What comes through is not esoteric or academic, not something only appealing to punks or poets, but a feeling of being alive. All four are very smart, funny, engaging and interesting individuals and Vale really knows how to bring out their personalities. This is like a bible of common sense from 4 great prophets of the eternal underground. If you yearn to be creative and find your own happiness outside of the constraints of a 9-5 job and mainstream culture, this book will hopefully be an inspiration to you. It's also refreshing to hear people talking about important political and philosophical issues in a way that makes you believe that you can be involved and help make culture and live how you want. We also glimpse into their lives outside of the public eye through some wonderful storytelling. Vale helps to put the nail in the coffin of the "dumb punk" notion: these guys are geniuses. You need this book!

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Essentially, the best thing about "Real Conversations No. 1" is that it's just that -- a good chunk of honest dialogue between a guy and four other guys who sound like they're pretty close friends with him, talking about what's on their minds and in their lives (both theirs and his) in ways that are sometimes entertaining, sometimes thought-provoking and sometimes even illuminating. And, yes, at least two of the people talking in this book have figured somewhat prominently in the entertainment and pop culture landscapes for the past few years. But guess what? They actually say stuff that doesn't totally sound like part of their act! Henry Rollins, for all the macho, stoic bluster that he gives off, turns out to be pretty funny and down-to-earth, as well as enthusiastic to the point of geekdom when it comes to archiving bootlegs of bands that he admires and/or played with. Jello Biafra's comments are obviously more political and exhibitionist, but he does make light of how he got that way in the first place, and how he was just as inspired by other people in the anti-WTO protests in Seattle as they were by him. Besides that, the most wholly "inspirational" words probably come from Billy Childish, who advocates "doing it yourself" (and "thinking and taking responsibility for yourself" as well) not just as a moral or even as a craft, but as something that fits into enjoying the simple fact that you're alive. And Lawrence Ferlinghetti comes off almost as the wise grandfatherly figure who has a wealth of stories to tell about the past but knows pretty clearly about what the future entails.

But really, the total effect of all these conversations for me wasn't so much hero worship or a privileged glimpse into the workings of complicated minds. It was more the idea that, if I ever had the chance, I'd wanna hang out with these people and talk about some of this stuff with them myself. (Of course, in some ways, I'm not sure that I could even get a word in edgewise, but that's another matter.) I guess that's one of my personal reasons for being glad that I bought this book directly from Re/Search in San Francisco, almost beyond the whole deal of supporting the independents: When I called the place up to inquire about my order right after the attacks happened, I thought at first that I'd gotten a particularly thoughtful and conversational assistant who sounded vaguely like Jello Biafra on the phone. It turned out to be Vale himself, and we talked for maybe half an hour about the attacks, how they'd played out on CNN and the likelihood that any chance for progressive politics was dead now. He seemed as interested in what I had to say as I was in what he had, and I think it probably helped get us both out of the shell-shock and thinking clearly again.

So maybe some of these good things still aren't quite out of reach yet. Or, if they are, then maybe now we'll scramble a bit more to get hold of them again.

2 noted ex-users turned full time cranks Biafra-speed, Rollins-ritalin fronting 2 good punk bands DeadKennedys and BlackFlag are getting old. Their legacies are questionable.
They both never met a microphone they didn't like. They talk more than little girls. Both are way too serious and need to lighten up. They're in the entertainment industry yet yearning for artistic integrity (then stick to arts and craft shows).

Rollins complains about book/album sales, his business, and his own niche marketing scheme. The guy brags about hard work, working out, and dislike of everything hokey and cheesy. Typical manic depressive straight edge loudmouth. Relax buddy, you need a rest guy. He turned out just like his parents, but he can't settle down. Hence the mass confusion running out of his head. Every job has it's ups and downs. They get monotonous and draining. Worrying about money [stinks], so you compromise nearly everything up to and including you're very being. Hank likes being "commercial" because big corporations pay well and promptly. Movies and commercials are money on the table. It's easy and if he doesn't take it someone else will.

Biafra is one man publicity stunt show. Running for mayor(truly funny and creative). Including a poster of sodomy in records and calling it artistic freedom under the holy grail of free speech. I don't know anyone who buys a record expecting or wanting such a thing. The poster is funny but is by all definitions pornographic. Not everyone has a dirty sense of humor. Jello fought and lost for our right to do such silly things. Now he worries about his company's future as a b-music distributer especialy with the rise of this internet file sharing thingy (more punk than the whole punk movement combined). He's made a living as a paranoid alarmist worrying people to death.

Bottom line, everyone's replacable, independent. Past succes doesn't guarantee future success, but that's who gets better odds. Like it or not. Whether your stuff has critical mass approval or not. Carrying the torch will get you burned both up and out. These guys are one trick ponies branching off into other areas. A good perspective on 2 long winded spotlight hogs. Their music speaks or itself. JB's album with no means no and doa are worth buying or downloading. Black Flag is good clean fun. RESEARCH/VSEARCH always put out good stuff.

Ferlinghetti's little book is full of big inspiration. It is a call to take poetry off the page and live the words. Buy extra copies for your friends and loves, for this is essential reading.

This great little book - small enough to carry in one's back pocket, like a New Testament or the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao - is my new Manifesto. "Poetry deconstructs power. Absolute poetry deconstructs absolutely." Happy deconstructing.

Ferlinghetti never ceases to amaze. The volume may be slim, but it is rich with Beat philosophy, true to the Cause. This is a must for fans of the Beat poets.

This is the best work of art that I've seen in a long time. Wonderful.

More bon mots from the old bard of San Francisco. To this day Ferlinghetti gets confused for a Beat poet. He is in fact a Bohemian poet and artist who only published the Beats. In this book his words are few but to the point. You want to keep this in your back pocket at all times. Who knows when you're gonna need some emergency wisdom!? He is one of the best poets alive and the title of Lawrence of America is well-earned for a man who single-handedly changed the literary landscape of this country. Thank you Lawrence! May the lights of all the cities of the world shine upon you.

totally agree with the first reviewer, many more people should be reading this book, expressing as it does a complete subjection to the writer's art and babbling about blowing up to fill a room. like breton perhaps ferlinghetti forgets about popular literary constraints and merely expresses himself in perfect sequences. remember philip quarles in Huxley's point counter point, he says that a good story could come out of one person's seemingly unmemorable journey from the bus stop next to his house and his front room. Ferlinghetti, like so many kids, spends these pages searching for the essence of the female,essentially. yes, read this book when drunk or tired, or both. or neither.

it worries me that no one has written a review for this book yet. they say i'll be the first. i'm ordering this book through amazon, but i read it my first time many moons ago, back when i was reading "watt" by beckett, and a lot of other wierd stuff. maybe it was just a point in my life, but this book spoke to me. wacked out on whatever those crazy beats got whacked out on, consumed by passion and equally consumed by confusion, ranting and pouring it all out on the page, this book is what comes out when you have nothing else to lose. read it. don't try and make sense of it. there is no sense when you are crushed by longing. this is a monument to that feeling you get when being in love makes you a deranged idiot.

A beautiful surrealist novel, this is the sort of thing that's so easy to do badly, and so difficult to do well. It doesn't have a plot so much as an underlying archetypal theme, that of Man pursuing the ideal & unattainable Feminine in all of Her ever-changing aspects; but it does have an ongoing narrative drive, one which unfolds in fluid prose, rich in imagery & emotional intensity. Ferlinghetti perfectly recreates the essence of a dream, which has its own logic & its own needs, and makes its own sort of deep sense. The reader has only to surrender to its flow & be carried along, with one image or scene yielding to another in a continuous surge of immediate experience & psychological surprise. Highly recommended!

When I looked at the cover of this book, I couldn't even begin to fathom what was inside of it. The story itself is so surreal that it wouldn't even be considered a story by some. The plot (if there is one) is so vauge that I couldn't identify it. And that's what makes ot good! I must read more Ferlenghetti. I have tried my hand at writing such a book, but with no sucess. The text is fresh, not at all dull. Don't try reading this while you're in your right mind, though, and not during the day, either. The scenes that the author creates are sort of harrowing, they linger in your mind, and they stick. Read it in small sections. It took me weeks, but it was worth it.
It is difficult to get used to Ferlenghetti's writing style, but once you're into it, it doesn't let go. It's all sort of like a dream, some parts a nightmare. The ending was hard to understand from my perspective, but it seems to sum everything up. I highly reccomend this book.

The new poems that begin this collection are wonderful; the voice is strong and sure with rich, fresh images and allusions that explode in all kinds of directions. the poems give me a chance to say, "Oh, I get that." or most of it.
I haven't gotten to the selected poems from all of his books, but I know it will be fun to read poems I haven't read in years.
This volume should be a must read for young rebels and writers; should be right up there on the shelf with On The Road and Howl

I bought this book after seeing Ferlinghetti speak at my school in New Hampshire. He was fantastic, and his book is even more so. Buy it!

Some of these poems are really really good! Ferlinghetti has great imagination, humor, moments of enlightenment or shall i just say that his poems are really fresh and astonishingly real and immediate? From poems about underwear to poems about Mattisse art exhibits, this collection is a must have for poetry lovers!

I'd also recommend Gregory Corso's poetry collections for those of you who are interested.

This collection of poems from Ferlinghetti opens the mind due to it's variation of poems from over the years. His style has remained the same yet we see a different side of Ferlinghetti with each era of poems. This was very enjoyable and I recommend it highly.

"Pictures of the Gone World" had not been so fully praised as Ferlinghetti's next book of poems, "A Coney Island of the Mind". The only reason I can come up with is the extensive use of surrealist imagery and references to other poets, painters, sculptors etc., that the poems are full with. But in "Coney Island" there is a similar creative procedure--even the line order is "floating", as in "Pictures", so why is this book less known than "Coney Island"? It is probably not a matter of quality; probably more people feel attracted to read a book about Coney Island than one with a title which at first sight doesn't seem to say too much about its content.
The poems incuded in "Pictures" are nevertheless great. This collection of verse is probably one of the most representative works during the Beat generation, along with Ginsberg's "Howl and other poems" (also published in City Lights Books) and Kerouac's "On the Road". Ferlinghetti succesfully intertwines surrealistic and dadaistic tendencies with oral speech, complex verbalization processes such as ekphrasis, which show the poet's skills at his best.
This second edition brings us 18 new poems, which every Beat fan must get. Some of these new poems are quite remarkable, such as "Surfers are poets too", and there are some "addenda" to the previous ones. For example, no. 6 includes a whole new stanza, and words in no. 1 have been changed. This 1995 edition is also a collector's item, for it was published to celebrate 40 years of City Lights publishing.

I am embarassed to say that I picked this book up on my last visit to City Lights (several years ago) but I never actually read it. Other than for a piece or two in an anthology, I had never read Ferlinghetti, period. Having enjoyed the hospitality of the upstairs poetry room, that seemed somehow ill-mannered of me.

Simply put, I liked this collection. The images and meanings are more subtle than a lot of poets with Beat roots. He can really paint a word picture to put you in the scene. You instantly soak up the nuances of the whole. Then maybe he'll nudge you, ever so slightly, into seeing the absurdity in it. Or perhaps he'll interject a reminder of your own mortality in a simular subtle way. It is appropriate that one of the poems deals with Edward Hopper. I get that Hopperesque quality of an observer in an existential urban landscape with much of the collection.

About the only difference that I detected from the first 27 poems (written by 1955) and the 18 new ones (new in 1995) is a difference in rhythm. The older poems have much more of that classic coffee house beat- at least in my head. Of yes, he also uses the term "cyberpunk" in one of them.... But the word painting, and sense of subtle absurdity, is still right on the money.

This has to be my favorite volume of poetry to date (yet I am still young and have much to read). I found it "refreshing" and "light" if you will, yet at the same time taking on some real insight. My favorite poems in the volume include "Heaven"; which I take as almost a poetic criticism OF poetry, and "London"; which takes on issues of physical beauty. All the poems in here I enjoy immensely. Well worth your small investment. (Plus it has historic value being the first in the legendary Pocket Poets Series.

calling ferlinghetti's work anything less than the above would be blasphemous, but really, what great writing! i love his observations and insights on different places and people. and the way he puts words together, like "concrete crete", in one poem. i read these poems, and sit dumbfounded, in public places no less, breathless, with a goofy grin on my face. these poems are absolute masterpieces. a must for any europhile, traveler, tourist, beatnik-wannabe. heck, a must in general.

calling ferlinghetti's work anything less than the above would be blasphemous, but really, what great writing! i love his observations and insights on different places and people. and the way he puts words together, like "concrete crete", in one poem. i read these poems, and sit dumbfounded, in public places no less, breathless, with a goofy grin on my face. these poems are absolute masterpieces. a must for any europhile, traveler, tourist, beatnik-wannabe. heck, a must in general.

This is a great book for exploring the Bohemian poetry movement in the U.S. (namely, San Francisco). Contains the poem, "Autobiography," in which Ferlinghetti misidentifies Mount Rushmore as existing in North Dakota--but as I met him recently at a reading at the U of Minnesota, he was cool about it--knew exactly what I was talking about. . .so maybe he has learned a little since the time he wrote it!

A Far Rockaway of the Heart is Ferlinghetti's most recent anthology of poetry, and it's one of his best. With more than one hundred poems, it's also packed full of passion. I think that after many years of searching, Ferlinghetti finally found his true voice. These poems are sometimes funny, sometimes painful, but always beautifully created and full of life.

The reviewers didn't get this book. Ferlinghetti speaks to the heart of American experience here in the spirit of John Dos Passos "USA" but without Dos Passos political hysteria. Americus is a great overview of American poetics while at the same time being this incredible distillation of Ferlighetti's own vision of American and the world. To read this book is to revisit some of Ferlinghetti's best writing as he looks back on the world so far. It is an incredible achievment in a time where it is so unfashionable to be political or to see the world beyond the elitest confines of academic poetry. The Publisher's Weekly review misses the mark, he does not try to rival Whitman or Pound, but he takes that voice into our new millenium. I see him as a continuation of the work that so many modern poets are afraid to take up. I am looking forward to book II.

I lived in The City from '67 to '73 and was there during the heyday of Haight Ashbury and the mammoth explosion of all that was pre-Altimont but for some strange reason Beat San Francisco was far more important in my memory than The Haight. The reasons probably have much to do with why I finished Morgan's short book in only a day because I became so involved in his descriptions of the places that I considered my San Francisco-all of Upper Grant after it crosses Columbus with Caffe' Trieste and the New Pisa and of course City Lights, Discovery and Vesuvio with Tosca watching from the other side of the street.

Even though I now live on the other side of the planet, these places are burned into my memory. They're memories of cold winter evenings searching for the inevitable bargain in Discovery and then going next door to City Lights to troll through its basement looking at all the titles that I wanted but couldn't afford as a student. And on Saturday afternoons going into Trieste and buying a cafe' and knowing that not so many years ago this place was the epicenter for guys that wore old berets, had beards and thought.

I am indebted to Bill Morgan for writing such a heartwarming look back at a time and place that will go on in the hearts of Americans that realize there was a recent time when things could have gone another way. It didn't happen but with people like him keeping the memory alive and people who care enough to take pictures of City Lights for people like me who remember- perhaps all has not been lost.

Buy the book and revisit these modern American icons before they are redeveloped.