![]() ![]() “The Flame” has a little of everything for Cohen fans and nothing for anyone else. At any moment of the day, “Suzanne” is probably playing in an elevator somewhere. ![]() Still, songs like “Suzanne,” “Bird on the Wire” and the rather preposterous hymn of praise “Hallelujah” have been so widely covered as to be nearly inescapable. Many found him a bit much, his heart-on-his-sleeve misery no more appealing than plunging your hands into boiling tar. He wasn’t much of a singer, either but the gravelly renderings of his lyrics gradually attracted a mass audience that seemed more like a cult. Leonard Cohen, who died two years ago, wore many a fedora - poet, novelist, songwriter, a singer of sorts - but only the last trade, which he took up reluctantly, made him a star.Ĭohen was never taken very seriously as a poet. Death is the moment when all eyes are upon the poet for the last time beyond, for most harmless drudges, lies the abyss. ![]() This is the book business at its darkest and most human, but many balance sheets have been balanced by a posthumous work or two. When a poet dies, his publishers often hurry into print whatever scraps lie stuffed in his desk drawers or overflow his wastebasket. ![]() THE FLAME Poems, Notebooks, Lyrics, Drawings By Leonard Cohen Edited by Robert Faggen and Alexandra Pleshoyano 277 pp. ![]()
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