In 1924, with Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, a new voice appeared in Chilean poetry, captivating readers around the world. Almost fifty years later, in 1970, Neruda published The Stones of Heaven, shortly before being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In Neruda's poetry, there are always waves, anemones, figureheads, beaches... And, in his words, the reader sails—and is shipwrecked. Because although Neruda looks to the sky in search of stones, his eyes are full of the sea. That of his Isla Negra in Valparaíso and of so many of his other voyages: from the Indian Ocean to the Tyrrhenian; exile in Naples or consul in Rangoon. Those stones are, for the poet of the sea, the salt of heaven.