Globe and Mail Review of Book of Longing

Everything about Leonard's 2006 book of poetry and Anjani's album
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Anne
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Joined: Sat Jun 29, 2002 6:08 am

Globe and Mail Review of Book of Longing

Post by Anne »

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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.
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st theresa
Posts: 430
Joined: Wed Jan 18, 2006 7:24 pm
Location: Edmonton Alberta

Post by st theresa »

Kewl --I just read this article this morning and here it is already. Nice to see Leonard back in the public eye. Thanks for the posting Anne.
Andrew McGeever
Posts: 905
Joined: Sun Jul 07, 2002 10:02 pm

Post by Andrew McGeever »

Dear Anne,
I read your post: many thanks for the review of The Book Of Longing.
I notice also that you joined the forum on June 29th, 2002.
My birthday is on June 29th.
Enough of this!
I'll soon receive a copy of The Book Of Longing, thanks to my son who lives on the western side of the pond.
Andrew.
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