Our Latest Recommendation for Lil’ Sprouts Book Club: In The Garden With Pablo Neruda

Lil’ Sprouts Book Club is a monthly Garden Collage feature where we spotlight nature- and garden-related books for kids age 2 and up that encourage green education. The books are designed to evoke the core mission of Garden Collage: to bring the garden (and nature) into people’s lives.

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Our book club choice for March channels this month’s theme of “The Artist’s Garden”. While visual artists often dominate the association with art and gardens, there are many writers who have found inspiration in nature and who have crafted beautiful works around it. Among the more accomplished and notable within this group is the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda– one of our favorite authors and a man who was known for his sensitive transmission of beauty and grace.

Born in 1904 in Parral (a small city south of Santiago), Neruda distinguished himself over the course of his life as not only an immense poet, but as a formidable activist and diplomat. His poetry evaded definition, always evolving and changing to reflect new developments in his own life. Today, Neruda is recognized as one of the most influential poets of the last hundred years, but even by his peers he was known as “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language” (so remarked Gabriel Garcia Marquez, himself an extremely accomplished writer).

Though his style shifted with time, Neruda always drew on nature and natural elements as both his inspiration and as a complement to his words.

Monica Brown’s book, Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People, captures the beauty of Neruda’s words with the help of Julie Paschkis’s vibrant illustrations. Paschkis weaves words in English and Spanish into the very fabric of Neruda’s narrative, growing with him as he learns more about the environment that surrounds him.

Neruda’s poetry is a masterclass in evocative language; his voice manages to both capture the depth of nature and to make it come alive. For Lil’ Sprouts, his poetry highlights–with its vivid, intense imagery–what an incredible inspiration and resource nature can be, and how nature can be appropriated and venerated through other mediums.

In honor of Neruda’s work, here is our favorite Neruda poem, “Ode To Tomatoes” (translated from the original “Oda al Tomate”):

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it’s time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.