Some of the pages of this beautifully designed book feature Cohen’s elegant handwriting. In it, he speaks powerfully about discovering his voice and how it was reading the Spanish poet Lorca that helped him to do so Lorca, he says, “gave me permission to… locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence”. “I hungered for a voice,” Cohen said in his acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Award in Spain in 2011, here reprinted. Read more: The 19 best fiction, sci-fi and fantasy books for autumn 2018 He ranges from winter on Mount Baldy in California to the lift of the Manchester Malmaison Hotel. If the emotional range is astonishing, the geographical reach is wide, too, for Cohen was a great chronicler of place.
The entire collection is an intricate exploration of the happenings of the human heart, infused with Cohen’s signature themes of longing, love and loss. Along the way he laid bare the brokenness of being human – and how to bear it – with his famous acknowledgement that: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen in 1980 (Photo: Getty)
Indeed, his final album was titled You Want it Darker, the meaning of which he discussed in one of his last email exchanges with a friend, included here.Ĭohen tunnelled through the darkness until he found light within it. Cohen was also adept at depicting darkness a time when “every guiding light was gone”, and “the hundred thousand darknesses / that go around insisting / they’re my heart”. The image of the flame flickers throughout this collection: “sometimes the light of a firefly, sometimes the light of a furnace”, as he writes in his notebooks. If the emotional range is astonishing, the geographical reach is wide, too: Cohen ranges from winter on Mount Baldy in California to the lift of the Manchester Malmaison Hotel He would rigorously meditate to “focus his mind through the acute pain of multiple compression fractures and the weakening of his body”. This final book became “his sole breathing purpose at the end”, and compiling it before he died two years ago was no mean feat. Melmoth by Sarah Perry, review: The Essex Serpent’s creator is back with a Gothic chiller His first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, published in 1956, was followed by 12 more books, including two novels. Although Cohen gained global acclaim as a singer-songwriter, his core vocation, says his son, was as a poet.
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