Gift by Leonard Cohen

 

Gift

by Leonard Cohen

 

You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me.

As the mist leaves no scar by Leonard Cohen

 

As the mist leaves no scar

by Leonard Cohen

 

As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.

 
When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter,
Then turn, then fall to sleep.

 
As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure,
When one is gone and far.

Steer your way by Leonard Cohen

 

Steer your way 

by Leonard Cohen

 

Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the Mall

Steer your way through the fables of Creation and the Fall

Steer your way past the Palaces that rise above the rot

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

Steer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterday

Such as Fundamental Goodness and the Wisdom of the Way

Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women whom you bought

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

Steer your path through the pain that is far more real than you

That has smashed the Cosmic Model, that has blinded every View

And please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or not

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

They whisper still, the injured stones, the blunted mountains weep

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap

And say the Mea Culpa, which you’ve gradually forgot

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

Steer your way, O my heart, though I have no right to ask

To the one who was never never equal to the task

Who knows he’s been convicted, who knows he will be shot

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

Leonard Cohen / 1934 - 2016

 

Leonard Cohen by Hari Mitrushi

Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)

NOVEMBER 11, 2016 | BY ALAN TAYLOR

11th November 2016

WHEN in the 1960s I first became aware of Leonard Cohen he was known, even to his fans, as ‘Laughing Len’. It was not a nickname I thought fair and I used vehemently to argue that it was unjust. But, privately, I had to concede that the Canadian minstrel was not the kind of singer-songwriter to send you on your way rejoicing. With a voice that was deeper than a bottomless pit and lyrics that were on liturgical side of depressing, he was the antithesis of San Francisco-style flower power. 

Like Woody Allen, or Randy Newman, or Bob Dylan, Cohen seemed to be wrapped up in angst of his own making. He did not sound like someone who wanted to entertain; rather, he wanted, in his austere manner to probe what it means to be human and what the purpose of life is. It’s not easy, and certainly not commercial, to encapsulate all that into a two and half minute pop song.

This is the Cohen Liel Leibovitz gallantly attempts to explicate in this illuminating critical biography. He fastens on three aspects of his subject’s hinterland. The first is his Jewishness. Like Philip Roth, Cohen’s relationship to the religion of his forebears is ambivalent. The world in which he grew up in the 1940s was, as Leibovitz points out, almost entirely Jewish. His father, who was wounded in the First World War, was  a broken, disappointed man who died, Cohen recalled, ‘spitting blood, wondering why he wasn’t president of the synagogue’.

His son was slated to follow him into the family textile business, but that was not to be. What Cohen did inherit was the millstone of being part of a race that was ‘chosen’ by God. But chosen to do what? And why? One imagines these questions  haunt him still.

The second aspect on which Leibovitz focusses is Cohen’s nationality. He is a Canadian and proud of it. Born in Montreal, he came of age when it was still possible seriously to argue whether there was such a thing as Canadian literature. For Cohen, two very different Jewish Canadian writers – the poets Irving Layton and A.M. Klein – were formative. Another, the novelist Mordecai Richler, was provocative. Writing in a Canadian magazine, Richler argued that ‘the  best influences in the world reach us from New York’ and that ‘the longest unmanned frontier in the world is an artificial one and I look forward to the day when it will disappear’.

Cohen read these remarks while in exile in Greece and was riled. He defined himself as Canadian and felt that a denial of one’s nationality was prompted by insecurity and a fear of being labelled hicks. Comparisons with Scotland today are so obvious they needn’t be laboured. Cohen said that he would like to punch Richler’s nose. ‘Unless we explore our own possibilities – these things we consider corny – then we’ll lose something valuable.’

The third, and perhaps most vital, aspect of Cohen to which Leibovitz turns is his poetry. Long before he ever appeared on stage with a guitar he was known as a poet. His first collection, ‘Let Us Compare Mythologies’, appeared in 1956, shortly after he graduated from McGill University. His second, ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’, came five years later. Both were infused with the spirit of duende, which Federico Garcia Lorca – on whom Cohen doted – described as ‘a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvellous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale…’

Duende was what Cohen distinguished a poet and, later, as a performer. His songs, like Dylan’s, seem to have existed in the ether before he found them and put them on albums. Moreover, Cohen himself appeared to speak of things with a timeless, placeless, mystical authority. He was a leader, Field Commander Cohen, in charge of a band called Army, singing of war and armageddon, angels and pain, love and hate. As he has grown older he has become a guru, for whom crowds will turn up simply to bear witness to his presence. All are eager to hear him intone ‘Hallelujah’, of which says Leibowitz, there have been an ‘obscene’ number of cover versions, not one of which, needless to say, compares with the original. 

Some of Cohen’s poems appeared in SRB Issue 7:1, you can read them here

* *

A Broken Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen’s Secret Chord; by Liel Leibovitz

Sandstone Press: £14.99, ISBN: 978-1908737861, PP224

* *

This review first appeared in the Herald.

SCOTTISH REVIEW OF BOOKS

Leonard Cohen / Dance Me To The End Of Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGorjBVag0I

Leonard Cohen 

Dance Me To The End Of Love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone

Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon

Show me slowly what I only know the limits of

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on

Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long

We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born

Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn

Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in

Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the end of love

Youtube

Leonard Cohen / Beneath My Hands

Beneath My Hands 

by Leonard Cohen

Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing fallen sparrows.

Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.

I am speechless
because you have fallen beside me
because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.

I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me hunter.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.

I want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.

Leonard Cohen / The Reason I Write
Leonard Cohen / Thousands
Leonard Cohen / Beneath My Hands

Leonard Cohen / Thousands

Leonard Cohen by Shayc

THOUSANDS

by Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen / Miles

Out of the thousands
who are known,
or who want to be known
as poets,
maybe one or two
are genuine
and the rest are fakes,
hanging around the sacred
precincts
trying to look like the real thing.
Needless to say
I am one of the fakes,
and this is my story

Book of Longing, 2006.

Leonard Cohen / The Reason I Write
Leonard Cohen / Thousands
Leonard Cohen / Beneath My Hands

Leonard Cohen / The Reason I Write

Red Shoes
Fifth Avenue, NY, 2012
Photo by Triunfo Arciniegas

THE REASON I WRITE

by Leonard Cohen

The reason I write

is to make something

as beautiful as you are

When I’m with you
I want to be the kind of hero
I wanted to be
when I was seven years old
a perfect man
who kills

Parasites of Heaven, 1966.

Leonard Cohen / The Reason I Write
Leonard Cohen / Thousands
Leonard Cohen / Beneath My Hands