KEEPING ‘THE FLAME’ ALIVE
THE final poems of Leonard Cohen, completed days before the legendary songwriter died, will be published in an anthology next year, his estate announced on Friday.
Entitled The Flame, the volume will include Cohen’s unpublished poems, his prose pieces and illustrations and lyrics to his three final albums. Explaining the metaphor in the title, Robert Kory, who was Cohen’s manager, said that the Montreal-born artist had finished The Flame days before his death and it |“reveals to all the intensity of his inner fire”.
“During the final months of his life, Leonard had a singular focus — completing this book taken largely from his unpublished poems and selections from his notebooks,” Kory said in a statement.
“The flame and how our culture threatened its extinction was a central concern.”
The book, which has United States, Canadian and British publishers, will come out in October next year.
Cohen died in November last year at age 82, just weeks after he released his last album, You
Want It Darker, whose lyrics reflected heavily on death, spirituality and his place in the universe.
While he became best known for meditative tunes such as
Hallelujah and So Long, Marianne, as well as the quirkier
First We Take Manhattan, Cohen turned to music relatively late, in his 30s, after establishing a literary career.
Cohen published poetry collections, including Flowers for
Hitler, and two novels, the latter of which, 1966’s Beautiful
Losers, incorporated indigenous mythology and became a classic of Canadian counterculture.
The announcement comes ahead of a memorial concert next month in Montreal for the anniversary of his death.