All that has been said about Pablo mills about, being said; there is only this thought remaining—perhaps his—on aesthetics, which is sheer constancy, not unlike those secrets he lowered in a bucket, down a drain for poor Delia: the way he only wrote well when he wasn't at sea. Imagine, then, where wet bodies wedge there is always the start, but only that, the promise, not even desire: the drowsy ships alighting in harbors with mizzenmasts unhinged, or thrust in salted earth and left, agog, to rot; imagine just the incipience is now sufficient, a rigging of air, the palpable hoist, the jinxes of sailors, the sexton's complacent equinox. Now he's dead, he might have wished for that much more, might have written— perhaps after—that loving, the horrible closure of it, wasn't what we thought at all; it formed, true, the arc of a saddle and the moon of a prow, yet still it seemed to buck itself and beg for any distant portage, the strakes of weed in crevices half on and off the captain's charts, or piled on the heaving starboard, or left adrift in perpetual sand. Of all that can be said about Neruda—his cradled, emerging nets, the poetry that craved in swollen doorsills— it was mostly too much for poor Delia or anyone to bear; it remains the bric-a-brac of oceans, the less important of slights: the one that began with his dreams or else never was heard from at all.© Seth Abramson
from American Literary Review