>>REVIEW
BOOK OF LONGING
Leonard Cohen
McClelland and Stewart
229 pp.
It was Helsinki in the late 1980s when I first came to appreciate the songs of Leonard Cohen. In Europe, Cohen is cool. In Scandinavia, he’s king. A fair-haired Finn picked up her guitar and played Dance Me to the End of Love. She was shy until Cohen’s lyrics immediately improved her English. She sang, "we’re both of us beneath our love, we’re both of us above."
I came back to Canada and tracked down his first four books of poetry, beginning with Let Us Compare Mythologies, published 50 years ago while Cohen was still an undergrad at McGill. Then I started buying the albums. Even the bad ones are good. Cohen songs have been covered the world over (there are at least 32 tribute albums), while fresh from Sundance, the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man hits theatres this June.
Book of Longing is the first collection of new work for Cohen (that he has not set to music) since Book of Mercy in 1984. Longing is a distinctive blend of despair, longing and hope. The poems are full of women, monks, a rabbi or two, but most of all Cohen himself. Interrogating himself, sketching himself in the hotel mirror.
In fact, this is the real surprise in Book of Longing – the dozens of drawings and decorations by Cohen. Tiny black-and-white details of desire are placed next to a lineup of grey self-portraits. They are welcoming, then warm, then they feel like Cohen has been locked up in an old folks’ home with only a notepad and pen.
Cohen’s take on art is suggested in the poem "Better," where stanzas begin:
"better than art
is repulsive art
better than wild
is secretly wild
better than poetry
is my poetry"
Cohen’s poetry is deceptively simple and I suspect no longer in style. Quatrains and couplets are still permitted, even those that rhyme:
"I followed the course
From chaos to art
Desire the horse
Depression the cart
Or, ‘The Sweetest Little Poem,’ in its entirety:
You go your way
I’ll go your way too"
There are also prose poems and lyrics – most of the album Ten New Songs (2001), including a page of additional verses to the masterful song "A Thousand Kisses Deep." In "A Note to the Chinese Reader," which appears to have been written for Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers, he writes, "This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously." I think this applies to all Cohen’s work, and it may be the on-off switch that separates those who love it from those who loathe it. For me, the more you read him, the more you smile.
In "My Mother Asleep," which describes his mother’s visit to Greece decades ago – when Cohen took a Canada Council grant and bought a house on Hydra – Cohen, the "I" in the poem, finishes with these heartfelt lines:
"I was young
I hadn’t had my children
I didn’t know how far away
your love could be
I didn’t know
how tired you could get"
There is also a hue of foreboding, a warning call to Longing, which is in all Cohen’s work. The collection finishes with "The Flood." Cohen writes:
"The body will drown
And the soul will break loose
I write all this down
But I don’t have the proof" |
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