Las Piedras del Cielo/Skystones is a bilingual editioned book of poems by Pablo Neruda, with translations by Ben Belitt. Inspired by continuous landscapes in Japanese scrolls, the book establishes a horizontal movement that feels as if you are traveling through a landscape. Every page has an image which continues from the page before, and the book becomes one continuous moving image punctuated by the poems, which are initially concealed behind flaps.
In contrast to this horizontal movement, each of the four poems is keyed to a color and a descending place in the atmosphere, creating a vertical movement. The first is keyed to violet and outer space, the second to topaz and the sky, the third to the earth and the sea, and the final poem encompasses the underground veins of lapis lazuli found in Neruda’s native Chile.
60 edition