On Leonard Cohen's Posthumous, Earnest Collection, The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings

At Los Angeles Review of Books, Shoshana Olidort reviews the final work by Leonard Cohen, The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings, released by FSG this week. "[A] sense of urgency, combined with an awareness of the fact that, despite a lifetime devoted to the written (and spoken) word, there was 'so little to say,' runs through this book," writes Olidort. "These two seemingly contradictory sentiments come together in Cohen’s words and images, his simple black illustrations, many of them self-portraits of the aged singer, providing a visual commentary on the accompanying texts." More:

Just weeks before he died, Cohen emailed the poet Peter Dale Scott, who had recently sent him a copy of his collection of poems, Walking on Darkness, with the inscription: “If you want it darker / This book is not for you / I have always wanted it lighter / And I think God does too.” What ensued was an email exchange about darkness, which is included in this book. Responding to Scott’s inscription, Cohen writes: “who says ’i’ want it darker? / who says the ’you’ is me? […] he will make it darker / he will make it light / according to his torah / which leonard did not write.” Here, the self-effacing prophet defers to God and the Torah that, while Leonard might transmit, “leonard did not write,” and which he “can’t even locate.”

More than his musical or poetic talent, what endeared Cohen to fans was an earnestness so rarely seen among the famous. While Oscar Wilde may have been onto something when he famously asserted that “[a]ll bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,” it would be ludicrous to conclude from this that genuine feeling necessarily begets bad poetry. Cohen managed to communicate his earnestness through songs and poetry to a worldwide fanbase, and many tributes to the artist published after his death pointed to the way that his songs seemed to speak directly to his listeners.

Read on at LARB.