The Flame

Description

The final work from Leonard Cohen, Canada’s most celebrated poet and an artist whose audience spans generations and whose work is known and loved throughout the world.The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen’s last poems, selected and ordered by the author in the final months of his life. Featuring lyrics, prose pieces, and illustrations, the book also contains an extensive selection from Cohen’s notebooks, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker.
An enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen’s storied literary career, The Flame showcases the full range of Leonard Cohen’s lyricism, from the exquisitely transcendent to the darkly funny. By turns devastatingly sad and winningly strange, these are the works of a poet and lyricist who set out to explore our darkest questions and came back wanting, yearning for more. Praise for The Flame:“[The Flame] is…a kaleidoscopic archive, a mix-tape of emotions that reveals Cohen’s fears and vulnerability with an unusually raw candour. After 10 books of poetry and two novels, it reminds us that the music man who taught the world to scale the chords of Hallelujah still considered writing his first and ultimate vocation.”—Maclean’s“Leonard Cohen does not use language to pose, startle or to reinvent. Words are his old comrades, and see him through to the end.”—The Guardian“The Flame is Leonard Cohen’s parting gift to the world. And like the best gifts, it’s thoughtful, nicely packaged and contains an element of surprise.”—Ottawa Citizen“In the pages of The Flame, Leonard Cohen feels more present than ever.”—Gazette (Montreal)“In The Flame, an aging artist struggles with questions of death and legacy—and tries not to take them too seriously…. [W]e’ll be listening to Cohen…for decades to come, with this collection as our companion.”—The Spectator LEONARD COHEN’s artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He published two novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, and ten previous books of poetry, including Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs and Book of Longing. During a recording career that spanned almost fifty years, he released fourteen studio albums, the last of which, You Want It Darker, was released in 2016. Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and the Glenn Gould Prize in 2011. He died on November 7, 2016. CA