Book of Longing
by Leonard Cohen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Leonard CohenEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2006-05-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Ecco
Book Reviews of Book of Longing
Book Review: A Long Time Coming For Modern Poetry
Summary: 5 Stars
Leonard Cohen's Book of Longing
Aside from being a creative genius in a multitude of artistic disciplines, Leonard Cohen is an old man. And with age comes wisdom. Take for example, this stanza from "Better."
better than art
is repulsive art
which demonstrates
better than scripture
the tiny measure
of your improvement
No dummy, this guy. But then, you knew that already.
Twenty years in the making, Book of Longing [Ecco/HarperCollins]was written on southern California's Mount Baldy and in Los Angeles, Montreal and Mumbai. The author of twelve books and seventeen albums of music, this collection of poems follows his highly acclaimed 1984 publication, Book of Mercy. Containing his own wonderful, playful and provocative line drawings, Book of Longing is a celebration of one of contemporary times' best and truest flesh-and-blood examples of unlimited artistic expression.
Leonard Cohen's poetry is loaded with Bukowski's truth and simple statements, but without the ugliness. There are tons of love poems, reflections on drinking and God (oops, I mean "G-d"--he's Jewish, you know), loneliness, philosophy, aging, friendships, food, sober highs, celebrations of the body and sex, sex, sex. But it's all done with manners--a classiness Bukowski never knew-- a masculine sensitivity that's never maudlin, and a ripe, heavy, juice-laden life that few words in print have ever had the strength to carry.
There are some moments when Cohen veers into classical meter and rhyme, but he pulls it off with the smart currency of the lyric, and yet somehow, even in the hipness, he can still manage to make the reader tear up:
And fragrant is the thought of you
The file on you complete
Except what we forgot to do
A thousand kisses deep
There is unresolved anger and hurt:
I could not kill
the way you kill
I could not hate
I tried, I failed
and
Fare thee well my nightingale
I lived but to be near you
Though you are singing somewhere still
I can no longer hear you
But mostly, in all its spiritual, physical and emotional forms, there is truth:
This is it
I'm not coming after you
I'm going to lie down for half an hour
This is it
I'm not going down
on your memory
I'm not rubbing my face in it anymore
I'm going to yawn
I'm going to stretch
I'm going to put a knitting needle
up my nose
and poke out my brain
I don't want to love you
for the rest of my life
I want your skin
to fall off my skin
I want my clamp
to release your clamp
I don't want to live
with this tongue hanging out
and another filthy song
in the place
of my baseball bat
This is it
I'm going to sleep now darling
Don't try to stop me
I'm going to sleep
I'll have a smooth face
and I'm going to drool
I'll be asleep
whether you love me or not
This is it
The New World Order
of wrinkles and bad breath
It's not going to be
like it was before
eating you
with my eyes closed
hoping you won't get up
and go away
It's going to be something else
Something worse
Something sillier
Something like this
only shorter
And when the reader gets to the last page, they know it can never be it. There is no choice but to turn back to the first page and start again.
O my love
don't you know that we have been killed
and that we died together
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