 Your kindness is kind your trueness is true I pray that you'll find your Beloved, too... (from early version of "The Book of Longing") Reviews & Articles 6) The Toronto Star, April 30, 2006 |
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Tao of Leonard Barbara Carey Cohen fanatics will find clues aplenty about the reasons for his descent from Mount Baldy and the like. Alas, Barbara Carey discovers, the ol' troubadour isn't "fishing in the Big Hearted River" much anymore - even his laments to the ravages of age lack the dark power of yore. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen McClelland & Stewart, 232 pages, $32.99 Leonard Cohen published his first collection of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, a half-century ago, when he was a 22-year-old undergraduate at McGill. He's now a senior citizen and a celebrity, but mythology is still a favourite subject, in a way: His new Book of Longing is something of a guide to the Tao of Leonard himself, as soulful ladies' man, spiritual seeker and gloomy prophet in a troubled world. The book contains songs, poems new and old, lots of drawings (mostly self-portraits) and miscellaneous jottings. (Here's "Butter Dish," in its entirety: "Darling, I now have a butter dish / that is shaped like a cow.") As a testament to the accomplishment of his poetry and song lyrics, it doesn't come close to the range and power of Stranger Music, which was published in 1993. That volume was a "best of" selection of poems and songs. The material in Book of Longing, on the other hand, seems culled from a personal journal and is sometimes revealing in a biographical sense but otherwise trifling; as such, it's grist for the mill of what Joni Mitchell (whose genius for song writing is more consistent than Cohen's) once described as "the star maker machinery." There's no denying that Cohen is a star, in part because he's shown an uncanny knack for expressing the changing Zeitgeist. He's a melancholy troubadour of both Songs of Innocence (his 1960s romantic idylls, like "Suzanne," have the dreamy resonance of a hippie fairy tale perfectly in tune with that era) and Songs of Experience (his apocalyptic 1990s hymns strike a timely note that signals a darker mood: "I've seen the future, baby: / it is murder"). The life that he describes in his writing is that of the restless seeker after transcendence — an idealism that perhaps strikes a chord with those of us whose own hunger for transformation has been sublimated into kitchen makeovers or squelched by the distractions and demands of the workaday world. The shadow side of that idealism is cynical disillusionment, and Cohen gives voice to that, too, often with self-lacerating irony. (As he puts it here, in "S.O.S. 1995": "The atrocities over there / the interior paralysis over here — / Pleased with the better deal?") Book of Longing has echoes of all those tendencies, but its main focus is on desire as the most powerful instrument of transcendence. In effect, the erotic is made holy — and hasn't it always been part of Cohen's mystique that he makes carnal pleasure seem like a higher calling? He combines the language of the sacred and the profane in his declarations of devotion, as in "Mission," where love and the spiritual mingle: "Beloved, I'm yours / As I've always been / From marrow to pore / From longing to skin ... Now that my mission / has come to its end: / Pray I'm forgiven / The life that I've led." Cohen once wrote, "love's the only engine of survival." In Book of Longing, he proves his allegiance to that notion with a number of worshipful poems about sexual union. But there's often a forlorn quality to his desire. Even if his intention is mordant humour, it's a bit sad to read "Sorrows of the Elderly," a four-line lament by the erstwhile ladies' man: "The old are kind. / The young are hot. / Love may be blind, / Desire is not." There's pathos, too, in his description of women who "have been / exceptionally kind / to my old age": "they bend over the bed / and cover me up / like a baby that is shivering." The spiritual path to enlightenment also has its rocky side. In earlier work, Cohen drew on his Jewish faith, though he also mixed in elements of Christian symbolism. His Book of Mercy, in particular, was essentially a series of psalms ("Blessed be the name of the glory of the kingdom forever and ever," he wrote in one poem). In 1994, Cohen entered the Zen Center on Mount Baldy, and was later ordained a Zen monk, but he left the order in 1999. The poems written in that period (which are included in Book of Longing) reveal that the poet's sensualist nature was at odds with the ascetic lifestyle on Mount Baldy; as he puts it sardonically: "I had no gift / for Spiritual Matters." The poems about his stint as a monk give little insight into what drew him to that Buddhist sect. Instead, we get the heretical reflections of a disgruntled disciple, which are as acerbically funny as they are irritable. In "The Lovesick Monk," he writes: "It's dismal here / The only thing I don't need / is a comb." He likens his experience as a monk to being drawn in to the Communist Party as a teenager (because of his interest in a girl, naturally), and refers to the monks as "a tiny band of steel-jawed zealots / who considered themselves / the Marines of the spiritual world." In fact, Cohen's repugnance for ideology provoked some of the work he's justly celebrated for, including the great, bleak song of apocalypse, "Democracy." There are poems in Book of Longing that despair of social breakdown, too, but with weariness: "I am too old / to learn the names / of the new killers," he writes in "Too Old." Elsewhere, Cohen seems equally dismayed by what he calls "The New World Order / of wrinkles and bad breath." In fact, the ravages of age are a favourite topic in Book of Longing — not exactly the kind of visionary message that will be welcomed by our youth-obsessed culture. But then, there always has been a mournful cast to Cohen's best work. He excels at what might be called fatalistic romanticism, and there are a few fine examples of it in Book of Longing: "I followed the course / from chaos to art / Desire the horse / Depression the cart," he writes in the title poem. Elsewhere, he concludes "My Time" with the poignant lines: "why do you lean me here / Lord of my life / lean me at this table / in the middle of the night / wondering / how to be beautiful." But there are also a number of verses and songs that seem facile. It's hard to imagine that even being set to music can help "The light came through the window / Straight from the sun above, / And so inside my little room / There plunged the rays of love." In one typically self-denigrating poem, Cohen describes poets and wannabes "hanging around the sacred precincts / trying to look like the real thing. / Needless to say // I am one of the fakes." I wouldn't go that far. Book of Longing has its highlights. But overall it remains a lesser vessel than Stranger Music, and readers wondering what all the fuss is about should go back to that earlier volume. Back then, in 1993, Leonard Cohen really was "fishing in the Big Hearted River." In this new collection, the fishing is more hit-and-miss. Barbara Carey is The Star's monthly Poetry columnist. Retrieved from www.thestar.com / Contributed by Anne ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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