From New Poems (Mosaic Press, 1982)

I train myself to
write almost daily.
I eat my bacon and eggs.
I invest in the lottery.
I dress warm when it rains.
I put on my overshoes
for the snow.
I live in a lonely room
where I awake
from dreams of you.
(page 9)


And you writing
your Greek poems
under a clear sky,
the red earth beneath
your feet.
I am caught in Montreal
struggling to get
this out
while it rains
and rains.
Where shall I go
for clearer lines,
more ample forms?
(page 43)


He comes to Montreal
quite often
to see his mother
and some friends
he doesn't quite know.
He doesn't write
when he is gone
and I spend the days
in idle loneliness.
Soon he will
depart
and what I want
to know is
when will I see
him again
as our graves
loom larger,
as our skeletons
stretch through our skins.
(page 83)


I called L
this morning
but he is not home.
Must be busy
with some girl
as he makes
his way to dust.
Instead of seeing
him I sit
in this restaurant
waiting for him
to return.
Nothing's happening.
Nothing moves my bones.
(page 94)


Here are my poems
flown across
the Mediterranean
to your doorstep
O poet.
Pick up your
mail and find
me there
still ranting of ice
and snow.
And the girl is far away.
(page 118)


I decided
I'd rather save
my money
than visit you
on the island.
Hydra is a British
war port
and the grey
clouds of war
will soon be upon us.
The Mediterranean
will be dark
with warships
upon it.
I am moving
towards my
destiny in
Montreal
with a thousand
dollars
in my pocket.
(page 33)


Here beside
the Mediterranian
your books
as my guide
(I do not read
much
other than
what you've written)
I take shape
and blossom
like the red
rocks that form
my soil.

The blue sea
the little island
brings peace
as once I was
weary with the world.
The bright light
adds youth to me
and I awake
from my deep slumber
in Canada's bones
on faraway shores.

Take me warm
air
and let the fury
that is in me
take shape
like the dark
clouds of war
I see on your
horizon.
(page 24)

Two poems
a day
keeps the doctor
away,
keeps me fit
and sound
ready for the
bleak steel
morning
and the day
filled woth words
after the
land of dreams
and the fitful
wakefulness
of sleep.
(page 14)

I am not alone here.
I have my shields
to protect me.
I wait for the hour
of perfect silence.
(page 75)

That's my pen
on the table.
That's my
paper
on the desk.
I will marry
them tonight
bellow this wintry
sky.
Great lines will
issue forth
and my song
will be sung
forever.
(page 74)

M.J. Stone
The Globe and Mail
December 31, 2004

He was an engaging scholar and poet who published his first book of verse when he was 15. Brilliant, brash, charismatic and loveable, Henry Moscovitch was a prodigy whose youthful potential was nipped in the bud when symptoms of schizophrenia suddenly advanced during his twenties.

In spite of his affliction, Mr. Moscovitch remained inspired by his muse. Unfortunately, the compulsion to destroy his compositions was as strong as his desire to put pen to paper. Were it not for concerned friends who regularly made copies of his poems before he could tear them up, much of his work would have been for naught.

In 1982, the salvaged poems were gathered together in a collection published by Mosaic Press titled New Poems. Leonard Cohen, a long-time friend, contributed the foreword to the edition. Mr. Cohen's expression of admiration and respect, written in verse, described Mr. Moscovitch as Canada's greatest poet: "... in wilds of poverty and solitude; I thank you for the years you spent alone with nothing to hang onto but a mood of Glory, searching words that Love could not elude."



The son of Morris and Hilda Moscovitch, he was born in Montreal. A brilliant student, young Henry appeared destined for greatness. He attended Herzliah High School where the poet and teacher Irving Layton recognized a prodigious talent. Mr. Layton, who founded Contact Press along with fellow lyricists Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster was instrumental in publishing Mr. Moscovitch's first book of poetry, The Serpent Ink, in 1956.

Although Mr. Dudek and Mr. Souster were reluctant to throw their support behind a precocious 15-year-old, Irving Layton was unwavering in his support and pushed to see the book published. A technician with the pen and a Montreal Rimbaud, Mr. Moscovitch's early poems are a mixture of rebellion and charm. Compositions found in The Serpent Ink, such as Jet, incorporate a sharp and arresting verse.

Whistling through the noonday
clouds
This sleek steel god swiftly flies
Clear to our astounded eyes then
hides
Itself a thick white haze
Soon to reappear and then rise
Like the paltry spit I spat up high

In the early 1960s, Mr. Moscovitch began studying political science at McGill University. Poet and University of Ottawa professor Seymour Mayne, who attended McGill during the same period, described his friend as a large man with a booming voice and eyes that were fixed and engaged. "He was a bold adventurer, opinionated, extremely well-read and thoughtful. He was unwavering in his convictions and assured of his own talent. He was filled with bravado, but he was simultaneously winsome and admirable."

Retired professor Michael Gnarowski was an editor at the student magazine Yes at McGill in the 1950s. He laughed when he recalled some of Mr. Moscovitch's antics. "I remember once he handed me a manila envelope filled with his poems. 'You should publish these instead of the shit you normally publish in your magazine.' Had it been anyone else I might have been offended by the conceit, but Henry was such a likeable and charismatic person it didn't upset me at all."

After graduating from McGill, Mr. Moscovitch won a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to study at Columbia University in New York. It was during his stay there, at the height of the counter-culture revolution, that he was introduced to LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide. By all accounts, repeated use of the hallucinogenic seemed to have triggered a genetic predisposition towards schizophrenia. After completing his studies in New York he returned to Montreal and began teaching Marxism at McGill, but symptoms of the disease were already beginning to show.

Michael Malus, a physician, writer and close friend of Mr. Moscovitch said that the disease often strikes adults in the prime of their lives and renders them a shadow of their former selves. "It ravages you spiritually, in terms of your identity and self-esteem. But Henry was a regal guy, in spite of that, like a Moses of the street."

Although frequently hospitalized, Mr. Moscovitch's downward spiral didn't undermine his capacities as a poet. Often he would call up friends to recite a poem he'd written before destroying it. Elaine Malus recalled how he would sometimes phone three or four times a day with his latest verse. In 1982, Dr. Malus, Montreal sculpture Morten Rosengarten and other caretakers of Mr. Moscovitch's compositions put together an anthology of his poetry titled New Poems. It had been nearly 20 years since he published his previous book of poetry, The Laughing Storm. The minimalist style of his new, untitled poems incorporated Zen simplicity, a confessional tone and beautiful, painful imagery.

Time goes by
my little poems
like smoke
from a fireplace.
You are getting
better as the rich
fabric of these times
supports you like a base.
Bloom and grow
forever
wild flowers
product
of my diseased
imagination.

A review of Mr. Moscovitch's work was featured in a 1983 issue of Canadian Literature. Critic George Woodcock wrote admiringly: "Reading Moscovitch's poems I am reminded, by their form as well as their mood, of those modest fountains in Japanese hermitages in which a thin, unbroken and oil-smooth jet of waters falls into the mirror of an old stone basin."

Howard Aster, life-long friend of Mr. Moscovitch and publisher of his last book of poems, described the stripped-down style of later verse as the poetic idiom distilled to its skeletal form. "The lines are no more than two or three words, absolutely astonishing and totally distinctive."

Mr. Moscovitch's final years were spent in a tiny a rooming house. He had grown more and more withdrawn and increasingly avoided contact with friends and admirers.

Henry Lawrence Moscovitch was born on Aug. 11, 1941, in Montreal. He died on Nov. 1, 2004. He was 63. He is survived by sisters Myra Greenstone, Joy Kellman and Esther Schrier.



Heraclitean Knowledge
[George Woodcock's review of Henry Moscovitch's New Poems, and books by Al Purdy, Bill Howell, and Henry Beisell, from Canadian Literature No. 97 (Summer, 1983). We're copying only parts dedicated to Moscovitch's book.]

(…) To see, after all these years, a new book by Henry Moscovitch is a reminder of the days when Montreal was a great centre of English poetry in Canada. The historic magazines published there, Preview and First Statement and Northern Review, are more than a quarter of a century in the past; many of the poets who made Montreal such a centre in the 1940's and 1950's are either dead, like A. M. Klein and Patrick Anderson, John Sutherland and John Glassco, or departed, like P. K. Page and Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. One of the few who have remained – F. R. Scott and Louis Dudek among them – Henry Moscovitch lapsed into the longest silence, at least so far as publication is concerned, though there seems to be internal evidence in New Poems that he has been quietly writing all along. In a rather fulsome prefatory poem, "Stanzas for H.M.", Leonard Cohen credits Moscovitch with writing "the bravest songs we have of loss and love's repair", and certainly loss and the endurance of loss are poignantly present in his work. It is the peculiarly compelling work of a man who has remained privately devoted to his art over the years without the sense of a need to offer his heart immediately to the public, a poet to whom Cohen's description later in his dedication, "well-ordered and alone", seems clearly to apply.

Reading Moscovitch's poems I am reminded, by their form as well as their mood, of those modest fountains in Japanese hermitages in which a thin, unbroken and oil-smooth jet of water falls into the mirror of an old stone basin. The poems are arranged in narrow columns – like water jets – with lines rarely of more than four syllables, and in feeling they have the cool certainty of falling water, and the Heraclitian knowledge that it is never the same water or, by analogy, the same human situation.

The days go by
like swift
running water.
I am disturbed
in my little shell.
I miss you
but it's not that
as I can hardly
remember your name.
The years
have erased you
from my memory.
I hardly know
what to call you:
force or destiny.
When you come
back you will
find me lost
in the fields
of another.

Stanzas for H.M.

O perfect gentleman, and champion
of the Royal Throne; O unbroken stone
of Sinai’s heart; O Hero of Verdun;
our greatest poet until now unknown,
whose banner over death has always flown
in wilds of poverty and solitude;
I thank you for the years you spent alone
with nothing to hang on to but a mood
of glory, searching words that Love could not elude

(We lost you for a while. The doctors tried
their hopeful science on a chosen soul,
but this chosen soul was sitting by the side
of G-d, and touched by Him, hale and whole,
though broken in men’s eyes, in His control.)
O friend who pardoned everyone who came
to light your dark and dim your aureole,
accept this awkward homage to your fame
(nor Modesty supply your instant counterclaim.)

We do not know the Will or voice that made
you fly from high Decarie’s overpass;
we do not know the Hebrew you obeyed
to raise your feet so far from sand and grass
and try the air, O faithful Anabas –
but blessed be the One who saved you there,
and bless His Name, His every Alias,
Who gave you, on that insubstantial stair,
the bravest songs we have of loss and love’s repair.

Dear Henry, I know you will forgive these
lines of mine, their clumsy antique tone,
for they are true and not mere obsequies,
and for all their rhetoric overblown
a simple gesture to the man you own,
whose friendship is so rare, whose art so pure,
simplicity is dazed, then overthrown –
alarmed and shy my love must I obscure
behind the fallen grandiose of literature.

I don’t know where I’m going any more.
I find myself a table and a chair.
I wait, I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
I change the room, the country. I compare
my clattering armoured blitz to your spare
weaponry of light, your refined address –
I know you stand where none of us would dare,
I know you kneel where none of us would guess,
well ordered and alone, huge heart, self-pitiless.
(Book of Longing, p. 113-4)
Originally published as the introduction to H.M.'s New Poems.


Montreal Afternoon

Henry and I
cover our heads
and write a few poems
The prayer book is open
The radio is playing
Henry says: They’re not
playing that right,
it should be faster.
The kitchen door is open
It’s raining
Henry says: I’m sorry I killed your father
It was a hunting accident
Rabbi Zerkin is speeding
toward us
through the wet city
with the woollen prayer-shawls
that he promised us
on the telephone
Henry says: In the year
sixteen hundred thousand
two hundred and twenty-nine
you will begin a commentary
on the Chumash
and in the year fourteen thousand
four hundred and forty-three
I will begin a commentary
on the Chumash
I’ll call mine Tzim Tzimay Ha Yerak
which means
The Contracted Greens of the Greenery;
then we will write a book together
called Acorns and Other Leaves
or
The Green Hills of Sunshine
We smoke Players Medium
drink cups of hot water
waiting for Rabbi Zerkin
Henry says: I’m sorry I killed your father
It was a hunting accident
But he’ll be back
So will Queen Elizabeth the First
(Book of Longing, p. 102-3)


Note
This page is a small tribute to the Montreal poet Henry Moscovitch, long-time friend of his collegue and fellow Montrealer Leonard Cohen, who - in his 2006 Book of Longing - published two poems dedicated to Henry - "Stanzas for HM" and "Montreal Afternoon" - and the drawing "Henry's Arm".

Credits
The Globe and Mail obituary and the photo (which shows Henry Moscovitch and Leonard's old, also deceased Montreal friend Yafa Lerner) are from the archive of Mr. Leonard Cohen, who also provided his two poems from the Book of Longing. Cover photo of New Poems was taken by Dominique Issermann. Moscovitch's signature was scanned from an autographed copy of his 1961 book The Laughing Storm (Promethean Publishing House, Montreal) held in the Gustafson Collection at McGill Rare Books. Very special thanks to Sylvain Belisle for the scan of the book, Moscovitch's signature and Canadian Literature review from the McGill Library.

Write me at tomsakic(at)yahoo.com.

Designed by Jurica Staresincic, with Tom Sakic, A Thousand Kisses Deep Website.

Connect back to www.bookoflonging.com or to The Leonard Cohen Files.

(c) Estate of Henry Moscovitch, Mr. Leonard Cohen, M.J. Stone, The Toronto Globe and Mail, Canadian Literature, Dominique Issermann, and George Woodcock.