 And thank's be to you for helping me out when Youth had no clue what's it all about... (from early version of "The Book of Longing") Reviews & Articles 7) The Montreal Gazette, May 6, 2006 |
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With tenderness and insight Leonard Cohen writes as an aging romantic HAROLD HEFT, Freelance Romanticism is not an artistic impulse that generally ages well. Like rock 'n' roll, it is a language of youth, sexual energy, spiritual longing and a quest for identity. This is the problem that Leonard Cohen, an iconic, aging romantic and one of Montreal's most accomplished native sons, confronts in his new volume of poetry, Book of Longing. The book is Cohen's first since Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, was published in 1993, and his first literary work since turning 70 a couple of years ago. It also appears on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the volume that launched his career, Let Us Compare Mythologies. I note all this not because I am fixated on age and the passage of time, but because the identity of the aging romantic is Cohen's own central preoccupation in Book of Longing. This is not surprising; Cohen's art - whether it is his music, poetry, fiction or, as on many pages of Book of Longing, graphic sketches - has always been relentlessly autobiographic. The self-portrait for which Cohen is most famous is that of the searcher who seeks spiritual completion in the experiences of loss, madness, marginalization, art, camaraderie, love and sex. In one of his best known poems, For Anne - "With Annie gone, / Whose eyes to compare / With the morning sun? // Not that I did compare, / But I do compare / Now that she's gone" - Cohen uses the bittersweet experience of loss to amplify self-understanding and hasten self-discovery. In Book of Longing, this focus on meaning through loss is still evident, as in the poem The Best, where Cohen realizes, "I died when I left Montreal," and notes that "Sorrow is the time to begin / Longing is the place to rejoice." Readers may be forgiven for regarding Book of Longing less as an independent volume than as a later chapter of the continuous narrative about the poet's quest. The earlier poems of the book examine closely Cohen's well-known years in a Buddhist monastery on Mount Baldy in California. Surprisingly, these poems do not lead Cohen or his reader toward a deeper spiritual awareness; they reveal the discovery of simplicity more than divinity: "I came down from the mountain / after many years of study / and rigorous practice /... I finally understood / I had no gift / for Spiritual Matters." Book of Longing then departs into the more familiar territory of women, G-d (which Cohen spells using the traditional Jewish hyphen) and, yes, longing, or rather the poet's growing distance from his lifelong desires. In the poem Because of a Few Songs, Cohen writes that his music has inspired women to be "exceptionally kind / to my old age." Whereas the younger Cohen may have used such occasions to celebrate passion as a path toward heightened awareness, Cohen notes that these women now "cover me up / like a baby that is shivering." Tenderness may have replaced passion, but Cohen's ability to capture this shift makes it poignant and meaningful. With loss comes insight. Cohen's own sketches illustrate many pages of Book of Longing - he is more of an accomplished doodler than an expert visual artist - and convey as clearly as his words his self-perception at this later stage of life. Most of the sketches are self-portraits of the poet as a stern, brooding and generally spent subject. Many other sketches, often on opposing pages to these self-portraits, are nubile young female nudes. These juxtapositions are stark, punctuating the growing distance between the poet and his muse. Few artists possess the ability to continue evolving throughout a prolonged career. Those who managed this feat - Michelangelo, Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, to name a few - achieved it by capitalizing on the vision that originally defined them, allowing it to progress toward greater clarity and focus through re-examination. A poet as public and exposed as Leonard Cohen could easily escape, intentionally or unintentionally, into the realm of self-parody, taking too seriously the cult of personality that has formed around him. Instead, in Book of Longing, he has taken what his friend Irving Layton called "the inescapable lousiness of growing old" and has given it, in its waning days, a profound romantic dignity. Harold Heft is the author of The Shape of This Dying: Remembering Alexander Bercovitch and has taught Leonard Cohen's writing in Canada and abroad. Book of Longing By Leonard Cohen McClelland & Stewart, 232 pages, $32.99 (c) The Gazette (Montreal) 2006 Retrieved from www.canada.com/montrealgazette / Contributed by Dick ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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