Flame

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD FOR POETRYTHESE POEMS AND NOTEBOOKS ARE THE LAST WORD FROM THE LATE, GREAT LEONARD COHENThe Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems and writings, selected and ordered by Cohen in the final months of his life. The book contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, featuring lyrics, prose pieces and illustrations, 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 has plumbed the depths of our darkest questions and come up wanting, yearning for more.

The last word in love and despair . . . Full of youthful spark, beauty and romance . . . Elegantly and posthumously published . . . Leonard Cohen does not use language to pose, startle or reinvent. Words are his old comrades, and see him through to the end, Cohen was a poet before he was a musician, and with this posthumous collection his career completes its circle. Encompassing poems and lyrics written in his last decade, as well as self-portraits and notebook extracts, the book is introduced by his son Adam Cohen, Cohen's enduring, beautiful bleakness is the draw here. His gift for understated melancholia is on each blackening page, We'll be listening to Cohen - still smirking and smiling - for decades to come, with this collection as our companion, For his final publication, he left almost nothing to chance . . . The Flame shows the emphasis that Cohen put on distillation . . . Included in various proportions are love, sex, death, regret, exaltation, piety and gentle fondness. The blending of the earthy with the spiritual would give John Donne and Marvin Gaye a run for their money

Leonard Cohen began his artistic career in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He went on to publish 12 more books, including two celebrated novels and gained worldwide recognition as an iconic singer-songwriter. He released 14 studio albums, including three in the last years of his life when he also became one of the most acclaimed arena performing artists in the world. Among his numerous honours, he is the recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award 2010, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2011, the inaugural New England PEN Award for Excellence in Lyrics 2012, the 2016 Juno Awards for Song of the Year and Album of the Year, and he has been inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the US Songwriters Hall of Fame. He died in November 2016.