 You can't go too deep if you want to swim where the mermaids weep out of love for Him... (from early version of "The Book of Longing") Reviews & Articles 4) The Globe and Mail, April 29, 2006 [See the front cover or Books section - Leonard Cohen: Book of Longing marks the return of the poet] |
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leonard Cohen's higher calling Fraser Sutherland Book of Longing By Leonard Cohen McClelland & Stewart, 232 pages, $32.99 One of the consummate singer-songwriters of our time, Leonard Cohen presents a special challenge to readers. Songs have music to make them poems; poems must make their own music. Alone with his poems on the page, we need earplugs to block the unmistakable rumble of Cohen's half-spoken, half-sung voice: waltz-like yet dirge-like, tender yet menacing, heartsick yet tough-minded. Cohen's aware of the problem. Mindful that a song falls short of all a poem can do, he's often distrusted the lure of his easy lyrical gifts, notoriously in the gesture of The Energy of Slaves (1972), whose stark monotonous lines perversely worked against his strengths. He's truer to his talent when, in Thing, one of the poems in Book of Longing, he says, "I am this thing that needs to sing." In Book of Longing, his 10th volume, Cohen turns the lyrical and the baldly declarative into counterweights. Ballads (some of which appear in altered form on his CD Ten New Songs) balance unrhymed or prose poems. All are informed by a new visual dimension: The pages are busy with his unschooled, repetitive, but surprisingly effective drawings and decorations. The total is not so much an illustrated collection of poems as it is a shaped autobiography. Convinced that poetry is a high calling, he says in Thousands that only one or two of thousands are genuine poets: Needless to say I am one of the fakes, and this is my story. He writes and draws his way from bourgeois Montreal beginnings to a life on the road, marked by datelines from the 1970s to the 1990s. One of them, Hydra, 1999, reminds of us of the Greek island where he wrote his novel Beautiful Losers. His final poem, The Flood, carries the tag "Sinai, 1973": The body will drown And the soul will break loose I write all this down But I don't have the proof In this wavering journey, a stable point is the monastery at Mt. Baldy, Calif., where, as "Jikan," he became a disciple of the Zen master Kyozan Joshu Roshi. (We may speculate that Roshi is the substitute father for the one he lost at the age of nine.) Dichotomies make entrances and exits: rootedness versus wandering, activity versus contemplation, mind versus body. One recurrent tussle is between the spirit of Judaism and that of Buddhism. Always writing "God" as "G-d," in the Hebrew fashion, he declares in Not a Jew: Anyone who says I'm not a Jew is not a Jew I'm very sorry but this decision is final If he cannot deny his Jewishness, he can at least battle lust. He records how, as part of his monastic routine at Mt. Baldy, he quickly puts on "about 20 pounds of clothing/ ... at 2:30 a.m./ over my enormous hard-on." (Early Morning at Mt. Baldy). Setting the scene in the title poem, he notes: I followed the course From chaos to art Desire the horse Depression the cart At moments, he resembles a hotel-room anchorite waging a private war between flesh and spirit (When I Drink). a woman lies down with me and every desire invites me to curl up naked in its dripping jaws He worships the women in his life, but there's a strong underlying sense that they're false gods. He struggles against their erotic undertow, yet cannot resist diving into it. To call Cohen a romantic is like saying that water is wet. At times, the ballads resemble updated blends of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. From Love Itself: All busy in the sunlight The flecks did float and dance, And I was tumbled up with them In formless circumstance. That's Stevenson. Frost shows up in Thousand Kisses Deep: I'm turning tricks I'm getting fixed I'm back on Boogie Street You lose your grip and then you slip Into the Masterpiece And maybe I had miles to drive And promises to keep You ditch it all to stay alive A thousand kisses deep A refrain also paces the 14 quatrains of There for You: Don't ask me how I know it's true I get it now I was there for you By contrast, he sometimes compresses the lyric about as far as it can go, as in the two-line poem The Sweetest Little Song: "You go your way/ I'll go your way too." This can result in archness, or a particularly pointless koan: "Darling, I now have a butter dish/ that is shaped like a cow" (Butter Dish). The poems of devotion to women, implicitly praising himself, are often overwhelmed by those of self-loathing. In Dear Diary he ruefully remarks: Sometimes just a list Of my events Is holier than the Bill of Rights And more intense He pillories his ego, and its clamorous claims for attention (I Wrote for Love): I wrote for love. Then I wrote for money. With someone like me it's the same thing. After a time, all the depictions of self-disgust can seem like false modesty or reverse narcissism, as in the prose poem A Note to the Chinese Reader: What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book. Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time. What needs no forgiving is Cohen's intermittent sense of comedy. In the prose poem The Luckiest Man in the World, he observes, "My advice is highly valued. For instance, don't piss on a large pine cone. It may not be a pine cone." He also advises, "It is difficult to make love to an insect, especially if you are well endowed. As for my own experience, not one single insect has ever complained." Occasionally, the self-deprecation is entirely disarming. In Layton's Question, he reports: Always after I tell him what I intend to do next, Layton solemnly inquires: Leonard, are you sure you're doing the wrong thing? Irving Layton, the close friend and mentor to whom Book of Longing is dedicated, was a shrewd judge of character. Fraser Sutherland's The Matuschka Case: Selected Poems 1970-2005 will appear this fall. Retrieved from globandmail.com / Contributed by Jarkko ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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