{"product_id":"poems-and-songs-cohen-isbn-9780307595836","title":"Poems and Songs: Cohen","description":"\u003cb\u003eA magnificent hardcover collection of song lyrics and poems from across the storied career of one of the most daring and affecting poet-songwriters in the world.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the more than half century since his first book of poems was published, Leonard Cohen has evolved into an international cult figure who transcends genres and generations. This anthology contains a cross section of his five decades of influential work, including such legendary songs as “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and “I’m Your Man” and searingly memorable poems from his many acclaimed poetry collections, including Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers, and Death of a Lady’s Man. Encompassing the erotic and the melancholy, the mystical and the sardonic, this volume showcases a writer of dazzling intelligence and live-wire emotional immediacy.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEveryman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eLeonard Cohen\u003c\/b\u003e’s artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, \u003ci\u003eLet Us Compare Mythologies\u003c\/i\u003e. He has published two novels, \u003ci\u003eThe Favourite Gam\u003c\/i\u003ee and \u003ci\u003eBeautiful Losers\u003c\/i\u003e, and eleven books of poetry, most recently \u003ci\u003eStranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eBook of Longing,\u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eLeonard Cohen: Poems and Songs\u003c\/i\u003e. He has to date released fourteen studio albums, the most recent of which, \u003ci\u003eYou Want It Darker, \u003c\/i\u003ewas released in 2016. Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize in 2011. Mr. Cohen died in 2016.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cu\u003eFrom the Foreword by Robert Faggen\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLeonard Cohen has for more than five decades never ceased to surprise us. Ever new, he has eroded an artificial boundary between poetry and song, an achievement that is not merely old but ancient — as ancient as Solomon of \u003ci\u003eSongs of Songs\u003c\/i\u003e or David the Psalmist; as old as the French troubadours whose ballads of courtly love and songs on metaphysical as well as vulgar and humorous themes proved an important foundation of modern poetry; and as old and mystical as St John of the Cross's \u003ci\u003eDark Night of the Soul \u003c\/i\u003eor St Teresa of Avila, whose mystical transformations of love poetry are beacons of religious verse.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCohen is the poet who wrote, in \"The News You Really Hate,\" \"You fucking whore, I thought you were really interested in music. I thought your heart was somewhat sorrowful\" and later transformed and compressed the sentiment into the line \"But you don't really care for music, do you?\" — a great dramatic gesture and a stunning hilarious rhyme (one of hundreds in Cohen's work) to \"Hallelujah,\" his remarkable mid-rash on epic agonies of Samson and David.  The sacred and the profane, the holy and the broken, the personal and the universal comingle in Cohen's poetry as he struggles, baffled, toward the light. Between the \"Nameless and the Name\" (\"Love Itself\") nothing can be unified before it is broken, nothing created or granted \"where death is forgotten, and the new thing grin\" (\"All My Life\").\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA native of Montreal, Cohen was born into a Jewish family rich in its tradition. But the French Catholic world of Montreal also became part of his life:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWe who belong to this city have never left The Church. The Jews are in The Church as they are in the snow. . . . The Church has used the winter to break us and now that we are broken we are going to pull down your pride. The pride of Canada and the pride of Quebec, the pride of the left and the pride of the right, the pride of muscle and the pride of heart, the insane pride of your particular vision will swell and explode because you have all dared to think of killing people. \u003c\/i\u003e(\"Montreal\")\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA rebel student at McGill University of modernist poets R. F. Scott, A. M. Klein, and, most particularly, Irving Layton, Cohen went on to live in Hydra, New York, Tennessee, Mumbai, and, of course, Los Angeles, among the monks of Mt Baldy's Zen Center, and in the freakish world of Singapore's Bugis Sreet. Blake, Lorca, Yeats, Wildes, Auden, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, Ramesh Balsekar, and Joshu Roshi occupy perhaps the most important seats in his pantheon of poets and seers. If his first book, \u003ci\u003eLet Us Compare Mythologies\u003c\/i\u003e, reveals the juxtaposition of Judeo-Christian and Eastern thought in his world, he continues to play with them twelve books later in \u003ci\u003eThe Book of Longing\u003c\/i\u003e. For Cohen poetry and song can go places and explore contradictions lost to theology. Surprise and reversal play nimbly and often in the poems. His razor wit and irony are no less evident than his ability to make the personal and seemingly surreal widely comprehensible:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Lord is such a monkey \u003cbr\u003eHe's such a woman too\u003cbr\u003eSuch a place of nothing\u003cbr\u003eSuch a face of you\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMay E crash into your temple\u003cbr\u003eAnd look out thru' your eyes\u003cbr\u003eAnd make you fall in love\u003cbr\u003eWith everybody you despise \u003cbr\u003e    \u003c\/i\u003e(\"The Drunk is Gender-Free\")\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis poetry beguiles us; its elegance and energy encompass so much well-wrought complexity. In the prayer \"If It Be Your Will,\" it is hard not to be stunned by a stanza that builds from a parallel but disturbing conditional line to three joyous exhortations and then falls to an enjambed line with a terrifying vision of suffering:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIf it be your will,\u003cbr\u003eif there is a choice,\u003cbr\u003elet the rivers fill,\u003cbr\u003elet the hills rejoice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet your mercy spill\u003cbr\u003eon all these burning hearts in hell\u003cbr\u003eif it be your will\u003cbr\u003eto make us well.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eNo less remarkable are the lines in the next stanza, \"in our rags of light, \/ all dressed to kill.\" These lines, like so many in Cohen, are searingly bright with the clarity of madness. They heal and tear asunder and heal again. And they keep us listening.","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304180535525,"sku":"NP9780307595836","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307595836.jpg?v=1767734908","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/poems-and-songs-cohen-isbn-9780307595836","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}