I was always working steady / But I never called it art / I was funding my depression / Meeting Jesus reading Marx, it begins. The poems aren't extremely polished but they have some sort of quality to them that just. Leonard Cohen’s posthumous The Flame (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) opens with Happens to the Heart, a poem written in the last year of his life. Just seeing the words scrawled through Cohen's notebooks, and sensing the emotions put into it, so candid and un-sensationalized. It's stunning because it never feels filtered. Even in his other books, published while he was alive, such as Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen's poetry is so. The rhymes are sometimes stilted, sometimes imperfect, but I think that's what I love most about them. He writes what he feels, and what he thinks, and sometimes it seems simple, or incoherent, or obvious. Not to say that other poets don't truly cherish the beauty of words and writing but when it comes to Cohen, the words don't have to try, or rhyme, or make sense. The Flame - Leonard Cohen - Google Books THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD FOR POETRY The Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the revered. Unlike a lot of other poetry I have read, Leonard Cohen is writing simply out of pure enjoyment. You can tell that he is writing these poems and lyrics not to impress people, not to sell, not to seem more distinguished or prominent, not to seem deep. Because the way that Leonard Cohen interacts with words- it's different. Reading this book, however, made me want to rediscover him, and take a deeper listen to his music.
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