"If you felt Leonard Cohen’s death in 2016 as a personal assault, this book is a posthumous balm . . . All of Cohen’s work has a raw, straight-to-the-heart intensity—reach for this the next time you need inspiration for a wedding toast that will leave them gutted, or any other moment you need a little sustenance for the soul." —Chloe Schama, Vogue
"Cohen's final volume shows his poetic soul. If you know the man only because of “Hallelujah” or “Suzanne,” pick up The Flame and warm yourself within its pages." —Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post
"It’s clear that Cohen remained sharp until the very end, and the book, a kind of farewell tribute by the poet-prophet, offers ample evidence of his abiding sense of humor . . . Though he claimed not to know the origins of his poetry nor to be able to locate his mission, what Cohen offered his many fans and followers was the opportunity to partake of the kind of spiritual experience that makes it possible for us to feel, if only for a moment, that we are not alone." —Shoshana Olidort, Los Angeles Review of Books
"[A] grand book . . . elegant . . . Leonard Cohen does not use language to pose, startle or to reinvent. Words are his old comrades, and see him through to the end." —Kate Kellaway, The Observer (U.K.)
"In The Flame, an aging artist struggles with questions of death and legacy — and tries not to take them too seriously, true to his claim never to do so . . . If [this is] how long it takes to say ‘so long’ to someone beautiful, we’ll be listening to Cohen — still smirking and smiling — for decades to come, with this collection as our companion." —Hannah Niemeier, The Spectator (U.K.)
"Poignant and brave, lit up with flashes of anger, this is a luminous collection and classic Cohen." —Booklist (starred)
"Cohen was a poet before he was a musician, and with this posthumous collection his career completes its circle." —Financial Times (Best Books of 2018)
"Steeped in somber reckoning, The Flame takes the long view that only age affords . . . Sprinkled with Cohen’s self-portrait sketches, The Flame is full of gestures so intimate it’s almost a voyeuristic experience . . . The work feels both like a final speech and a disrobing. In perusing the sizeable volume, one can’t help but feel privy to something raw and shining, both uncomfortably and movingly revealing, the final laying-bare of a unique chronicler of the human heart." —BookPage
"The Flame is Cohen's last gift to us . . .Cohen’s radical honesty and wit became more refined and purified with each passing year . . .He magicked and mastered us after all, getting us to clamor for the bitter pill of his tender, scathing, suffering, beatific vision." —Pamela Erens, Virginia Quarterly Review
"Authentic and revelatory in ways that final novels and poetry collections are not." —Charles Foran, The Walrus (Canada)
"The Flame provides fascinating insight into Cohen’s unique talent . . . The entire collection is an intricate exploration of the happenings of the human heart, infused with Cohen’s signature themes of longing, love and loss . . . The Flame shows the great power of words to endure long after the person who has written them has passed away, and to offer relief from suffering and elevate the spirits – not only for the writer, but for the reader and listener, too." —Anita Sethi, iNews (U.K.)
"A kaleidoscopic archive, a mix-tape of emotions that reveals Cohen’s fears and vulnerability with an unusually raw candour. After 10 books of poetry and two novels, it reminds us that the music man who taught the world to scale the chords of Hallelujah still considered writing his first and ultimate vocation . . . it seems Leonard Cohen has left enough words and music for us to carry on without him." —Brian D. Johnson, Macleans (Canada)
"Leonard Cohen offers in The Flame a collection of writing that stands proudly at the end of his body of work . . . Cohen’s poems emerge in The Flame as compelling, mingling all the different mentioned themes with a sense of urgency that lurks just beyond their lightness and somewhat self-deprecating humour. It’s a balance that Cohen has always navigated well, that between seriousness and playfulness, intensity and lightness." —Elisa Sabbadin, Pendora (Canada)
★ 2018-10-09
A gathering of late work by the poet, singer, and chronicler of life's more difficult moments.
Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) wrote hundreds of songs, all of which began as poems, as well as the novel Beautiful Losers (1966). If his fame dropped nearly to the point of disappearance in the 1980s, it was no accident: He withdrew from the world to become a Zen monk, and he remained so even during the years when, bilked by a manager, he returned to the stage to sing his way back to solvency. This gathering of poems, lyrics from his last four albums, sketches, and notebook jottings is emphatically for the Cohen completist, who will be fascinated by the process of how those random notes morphed into poems and then into such memorable songs as "You Want It Darker": "A million candles burning / For the love that never came / You want it darker / We kill the flame." In some instances, Cohen reiterates a Jewish piety that never quite left him; in others, as his editors note, he works themes and symbols that remained present in his work throughout his career, notably the fire that gives this volume its name. The volume, peppered with sketches and notes in the author's distinctive hand, closes with a speech given on the occasion of receiving a prize from the Spanish government, in which he connects his work to that nation by means of his early devotion to flamenco guitar and in which he protests that the award may be misplaced to some extent, since "poetry comes from a place that no one commands and no one conquers….In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often." That he managed to find that place so often, though, is abundantly clear in these pages.
Cohen's fans will be delighted, and students of poetic and lyrical composition have much to learn here as well.
