 My pen is too wet My ink is too black... (from early version of "The Book of Longing") Reviews & Articles 27) The Memphis Flyer, July 5, 2006 |
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Season's Readings Book of Longing By Leonard Cohen Corey Mesler Ecco, 240 pp., $24.95 Leonard Cohen has been making music and writing books for over 50 years. He is treasured for his ability to take the personal, typically in the form of bittersweet love affairs, and make it universal. He is, perhaps, more honored in his native Canada for his literary output than he is here, possibly because we are persnickety about letting a pop star into the pantheon. Cohen is also, mistakenly, labeled a gloom-laden songster, or as one wag put it, he makes music to slit your wrists by. He was and is an artist of the sacred and the profane, and he walks that tightrope with grace. "There is a war," he told us long ago, "between the odd and the even." In this, his first book of new poetry since Book of Mercy (1984), we find a man still longing, still searching, though there is about the collection an element of peacefulness, of - almost - contentment. In the title poem he says, "I know she is coming/I know she will look/And that is the longing/And this is the book." That's 22 years between Mercy and Longing, 22 years after which Cohen concludes, "Now that I am dying/I don't regret/A single step." Yet, there is even now restlessness and the pursuit that Cohen has elevated to the sanctified: the search for whatever it is that begins and often ends in the feminine. "[M]ay you speedily be embraced by/the girlishness of your own/dark girlish religion" is how he ends one poem. And in one of the book's many self-portraits (visual self-portraits: the book is illustrated with Cohen's own drawings) he has written on his own forehead, "I never found the girl/I never got rich/Follow me." Book of Longing, like Philip Roth's new novel, Everyman, is an old man's book, not so much a summing up as it is a memento mori. Or, in Cohen's case, a psalmody, for he approaches the shadow and wants to sing: "The Body I chased/It chased me as well/My longing's a place/My dying a sail." This collection of poems, lyrics, prose, and prose poems is perhaps the most complete and revealing that Cohen has ever produced. Nowhere else does the reader get as close to the man behind the lyricism. This is partly due to a fresher, more open style of writing and partly due to the book itself, a lovely production that invites the reader in. Cohen's drawings are charming, playful, dark, erotic, and pious. They complement the poems and elucidate the themes. Now 72 years old, Cohen is still scraping the raw emotions, still writing the difficult line, still probing, provoking, illuminating. Near the end of this gorgeous book, in one of the last drawings, he says, "Only one thing made him happy and now that it was gone everything made him happy." Longtime readers of Leonard Cohen may be able to guess what that one lost thing is and may suppose that this temperate ending does not mean that the war is not still going on. Retrieved from Memphis Flyer Online ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Back to Reviews & Articles. Welcome | Index | Works by Leonard Cohen | Reviews & Articles | Index of Titles / drawings, first lines & online poems | e-card | Credits & Thanks |
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