INSTALMENTS IN A LIFELONG PROJECT
To coincide with The Flame, McClell and & Stewart is providing a fine corrective for those whose Leonard Cohen shelves are in mismatched disarray: a uniform edition, sold in separate volumes, of his first six poetry collections and two novels. While each is its own beast, it’s striking how they can also be read as a single entity, instalments in an unbroken lifelong project. Add to these The Flame, and the collections Book of Mercy and Book of Longing, and you’ll pretty much have the lot.
Let Us Compare Mythologies, 1956
Bearing traces of a young man’s earnestness — the poems were written between the ages of 15 and 20 — Cohen’s debut contains enough of what was to come that you can imagine the excitement among the few who saw it when new. It’s often the simplest poems — see Rites, about a boy grieving for his father — that are the most affecting.
The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961
The Montreal Gazette said: “We are witnessing the rise of an excellent poet.” It wasn’t a bad call. Cohen, the conflicted aesthete and seeker, torn between the worldly and the monastic, emerges fully here.
The Favourite Game, 1963 If Cohen had never written anything else, this audacious coming-of-age novel would still stand proud as a Canadian classic. A Montreal novel to stand alongside the best of Gabrielle Roy, Mavis Gallant, Hugh MacLennan and Mordecai Richler.
Flowers for Hitler, 1964
The title, and the epigraph from Primo Levi, hint at what would be a Cohen trademark: a compulsion to visit the darkest places of history, and a perfect willingness to risk offence. Cohen himself called this a masterpiece on publication. From the beyond, he dares us to disagree.
Parasites of Heaven, 1966 No one had any idea at the time, but within a year and a half Cohen would be a celebrated singer-songwriter. His last pre-fame collection is thus a gold mine for readers seeking to chart how the poems bled into the songs and vice versa. For example, an untitled poem beginning “Suzanne … ” evolved into a song of that name.
Beautiful Losers, 1966
A novel with a higher experimental quotient than most readers might normally accept found its way into the world as a trashy-cover mass-market paperback after Cohen’s breakthrough as a musician. It was a true Trojan Horse operation, insinuating the name of Kateri Tekakwitha into world literature and leaving Cohen batting a perfect 1.000 on the novel front.
The Energy of Slaves, 1972
As with so much Cohen, this collection is powered by paradox: poems about the loss of the poet’s poetic powers attain their own poetic power. Cohen is at his most concentrated and economical here — there’s lots of white space, but every word counts.
Death of a Lady’s Man, 1978
Maybe people have been scared off by the title’s close resemblance to that of Death of a Ladies’ Man, the most problematic album in the Cohen catalogue. Whatever the reason, you sense that we are still catching up with this book. Its mix of verse with prose poems and Nabokovlike self-commentaries will be fodder in perpetuity.