Skimmings

By Roberto Ampuero

The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote about Latin American history and landscapes, the simple beauty and depth of ordinary objects, but perhaps most memorably, about love.

His inspiration drew from his life, and in Roberto Ampuero's novel "The Neruda Case," the poet reminisces about the women in his life during his final days, as the threat of a coup d'etat against socialist President Salvador Allende builds and Neruda grows increasingly weak from the cancer that would soon take his life.

In pursuit of his craft, love was often a casualty, and Ampuero's imagined Neruda is tormented by his past: The wife he abandoned with their dying daughter in Spain for an Argentine woman, whom he'd leave years later for a Chilean woman hired to help care for the poet while he was sick in Mexico.

But the woman who haunts him most is one with whom he had just a fleeting affair and who, decades later, has the answer to a question that could help him die in peace.

At a gathering among leftist friends, Neruda meets Cayetano Brule, a Cuban living in Chile.

Neruda convinces Brule he has the makings of a detective and hires him to track down an oncologist friend in Mexico who had been studying herbal remedies for cancer and who, unbeknown to Brule at the time, will lead him one step closer to the woman he needs to find.

Ampuero deftly lures readers into Brule's search. As he journeys from one country to another, he goes about unraveling the poet's past, struggling at times to reconcile the public and private image and life of Latin America's greatest poet.

In his lifetime, Neruda's works inspired lovers, politicians, the working class and revolutionaries. In death, the poet himself has been the subject of fictional works, films and music.

"The Neruda Case" is an important contribution, one that shows Neruda, albeit in a fictional light, as a man who grapples with his past and who, more than an admired poet, was an intensely flawed human.

"What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World"

By Robert Hass

The generous and gentle Robert Hass has titled his retrospective collection of essays and talks with a reference to a theme that always sets his work apart: the act of attention.

Visible from the first essay, written 27 years ago, through the last are the lush layers of Hass' rare combination of brilliance, erudition and self-awareness. He is unusually present, able to ponder "what light can do."

He offers his thoughts with surpassing clarity and circumspection. His passion for the subjects he surveys, dissects and gleefully honors is more tender than fiery - whether he is celebrating the complexity of Anton Chekhov's short stories, giving Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" the full cultural context it merits, or exploring the overlooked back story of a protest at the University of California at Berkeley.

A reader never feels ill-equipped, as so often happens with literary criticism.

Instead, we're all welcomed to the party Hass throws in honor of great creativity.

Hass often builds this openness on personal anecdotes, setting a critique of the Wallace Stevens poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" among his recollections of an impromptu drive with seven fellow students to Carmel, Calif., for example. Recounting how he and his friends read and reread the work enables Hass to discuss the evolution of his own thinking and include differing views of the poem.

Hass, a UC Berkeley professor who served as U.S. poet laureate from 1995 to 1997 and has received major awards for his poetry and a previous essay collection, writes with the confidence of deep familiarity. Nearly every piece teaches us something, though he rarely instructs.

If the collection includes perhaps too many essays and talks, or a reader finds one or another a bit too long, it's easy to skip ahead.

Savoring just one of these life-giving morsels is memorable, even transcendent.

Laura Impellizzeri, The Associated Press

Christine Armario, The Associated Press