The Flame - Leonard Cohen

THE FLAME - LEONARD COHEN

Another day, another book of Leonard Cohen poems. See? It's not all punk rock, class war, tending goats and drinking cider down here on the East Devon coast. We too have our romantic side even if tinged with the kind of melancholia that comes with the last vestiges of light from a setting sun over the cow shed.

The Flame is a collection of the last poems and lyrics Cohen wrote before his passing in 2016 and what permeates through all of them is Cohen's awareness of him growing old and the encroachment of death. They're not, as you might imagine, a right old barrel of laughs but the dignity Cohen has carried with him throughout his life is still there. And who better than a poet to write about death at their door and to look back upon a life of music, contemplation and love? What better poet in our modern age than Leonard Cohen?

'I pray for courage,' Cohen writes 'now I'm old. To greet the sickness, and the cold. I pray for courage, in the night. To bear the burden, make it light. I pray for courage, in the time. When suffering comes and starts to climb. I pray for courage, at the end. To see death coming, as a friend.'

As it has always been throughout his whole canon, the sadness in Cohen's words is all, as is the beauty. Not that you should feel obliged to kneel at his altar or to bow in any way before him because that's the last thing he would ever have wanted. It's only right, however, to acknowledge his near-genius and the near-pinnacle he reached in crafting poetry to music.

As Patti Smith once said: 'Any musician who described himself or herself as a poet who didn't answer to the name Leonard Cohen virtually guaranteed disappointment. Too many self-styled rock poets nearly killed the phenomenon.'

Leonard Cohen wasn't a genius as Bob Dylan once said but he was near to it and a line such as 'Like a bird on a wire,  like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free' says more than most political manifestoes ever have, that's for sure. No, Leonard Cohen was more like a saint. A wounded, troubled and fallen saint but a saint all the same, and his recordings and his books including this one - The Flame - are testament to that.

John Serpico