A review by laura_trap
The Flame: Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings by Leonard Cohen

5.0

I spent my entire Sunday reading this beautiful (and last) collection of Leonard Cohen's work. He is one of my favorite poets, I find that his voice is true, his writing has a sharp edge and dry wit to it that I connect to. And "The Flame" is no different. In this collection, which truly is a wide ranging collection of poetry, lyrics, snippets from various notebooks, and such, focuses on mortality and death, yet light and flame, there is a sense of lamentation here, a sense of God and religion, of reliving and walking through memory, of remembering the feeling of desire now that is extinct in old age. Cohen's final works are brilliant, touching, and emotionally moving. Unlike some of this other works which leaned towards a crassness and desire, here there is a certain tenderness, like this words reach out to caress the reader's hand as you read. One particularly piece of imagery that re-occurred through the poems was the image of the lily - a beautiful flower, associate with renewal in Christianity, they are also the flower for funerals. I did not want to part with this book, his words were so touching. Yet there was his humor too, his wittiness, and vitality, those were not absent, but presented along with the more sobering thoughts of memory, mortality, and the snuffing of a flame.
"out of the night/ the trees step forward/ a solitary bird/ sharpens its song/ on the stone-gray dawn"