The Flame
Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings
Download image
ISBN10: 1250234794
ISBN13: 9781250234797
Trade Paperback
288 Pages
$20.00
The Flame is the final work from Leonard Cohen, the revered poet and musician whose fans span generations and whose work is celebrated throughout the world. Featuring poems, excerpts from his private notebooks, lyrics, and hand-drawn self-portraits, The Flame offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist.
A reckoning with a life lived deeply and passionately, with wit and panache, The Flame is a valedictory work.
“This volume contains my father’s final efforts as a poet,” writes Cohen’s son, Adam Cohen, in his foreword. “It was what he was staying alive to do, his sole breathing purpose at the end.”
Leonard Cohen died in late 2016. But “each page of paper that he blackened,” in the words of his son, “was lasting evidence of a burning soul.”
Reviews
Praise for The Flame
"It’s clear that Cohen remained sharp until the very end, and the book, a kind of farewell tribute by the poet-prophet, offers ample evidence of his abiding sense of humor . . . Though he claimed not to know the origins of his poetry nor to be able to locate his mission, what Cohen offered his many fans and followers was the opportunity to partake of the kind of spiritual experience that makes it possible for us to feel, if only for a moment, that we are not alone."—Shoshana Olidort, Los Angeles Review of Books
"The Flame is Cohen's last gift to us . . . Cohen’s radical honesty and wit became more refined and purified with each passing year . . . He magicked and mastered us after all, getting us to clamor for the bitter pill of his tender, scathing, suffering, beatific vision."—Pamela Erens, Virginia Quarterly Review
"If you felt Leonard Cohen’s death in 2016 as a personal assault, this book is a posthumous balm . . . All of Cohen’s work has a raw, straight-to-the-heart intensity—reach for this the next time you need inspiration for a wedding toast that will leave them gutted, or any other moment you need a little sustenance for the soul."—Chloe Schama, Vogue
"In The Flame, an aging artist struggles with questions of death and legacy—and tries not to take them too seriously, true to his claim never to do so . . . If [this is] how long it takes to say ‘so long’ to someone beautiful, we’ll be listening to Cohen—still smirking and smiling—for decades to come, with this collection as our companion."—Hannah Niemeier, The Spectator
"Steeped in somber reckoning, The Flame takes the long view that only age affords . . . Sprinkled with Cohen’s self-portrait sketches, The Flame is full of gestures so intimate it’s almost a voyeuristic experience . . . The work feels both like a final speech and a disrobing. In perusing the sizeable volume, one can’t help but feel privy to something raw and shining, both uncomfortably and movingly revealing, the final laying-bare of a unique chronicler of the human heart."—BookPage
"Poignant and brave, lit up with flashes of anger, this is a luminous collection and classic Cohen."—Booklist (starred review)
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
HAPPENS TO THE HEART
I was always working steady
But I never called it art
I was funding my depression
Meeting Jesus reading Marx
Sure it failed my little fire
But it’s bright the dying spark
Go...
About the author
Leonard Cohen; Edited by Robert Faggen and Alexandra Pleshoyano
