Stranger Music by Leonard Cohen is a retrospective of his life's work entire, song lyrics and poetry books
until 1993, that shines in the New Age Renaissance Republique of Poetry. Leonard Cohen was a renowned and celebrated
Poet/Singer/Songwriter/Novelist born in Montreal, the "Golden Buddha" of the French peoples of Canada and Poets
everywhere. He studied at McGill University and was inducted into The Canadian Music Hall of Fame, The Canadian
Songwriters Hall of Fame, the order of Canada, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Glenn Gould Prize and the Prince
of Asturia Award. He is known for his love songs, ballads, hauntingly beautiful music with stark, beautiful lyrics
and poetry.
This Writer's first experience of Leonard Cohen was Summer 1967, riding around in the front seat of my step-father's
car, not being big enough to see over the dash, a space catapult through the streets of Toronto with Leonard Cohen's
Suzannne playing over the car radio. It was the 1960's, a revolution in culture, as the young people danced
into life after W.W. II in a celebration of rock 'n roll music, free love, peace, "flower power", "ban the bomb",
drug experimenttion, an experiment in the new freedom. Hippies and flower children, the poets and artists, musicians
and songwriters, in an awakening. It was a time of hope and rebirth, of seeking new answers, the new deal of
emancipation, finding our hearts and souls amongst the fallen rubble of the Old World Society. Out of the milieu of
the Kennedy brothers, Marilyn, Martin Luther King, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol,
The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel, Ella Fitzgerald,
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Joni Mitchell, Buffy St. Marie, Robert DeNiro, Beat Poets, Confessional
Poets, Pop Art and Rock n' Roll, Leonard Cohhen began to rise as one of the Bard's of the season. A life
lived in poetry, a photo in time, the Old World Society blossoming into the New Age. This poetry at its root
is a dissertation in love as war. N.A. as an overconstructed universe as
Cohen explores all the nuances of absurdist power constructs in intimate relationships. A series of loves/wars in
triumphant victory uuntil the space between. The poetry is an illustration of resilience, how people can survive and
live through the most cruel and unusual circumstances, the violence of an ended love relationship, writing into
the pain, writing the darkness into light, saving himself and us too. An economy of loss, the dispossessed, the world
as a movie, in the audience, on the screen. A symphony plays in the background of orchestrated violence of the state
of the Old World chaos, it is an exploration of "End Game".* Even with the birth of the new season perhaps not much
had changed and the brilliance of the role of the Artist. The written word as celebration, the everyday in beauty,
the everyday in darkness, a truthtelling.
This post-modernist poetry is in the Beat Poet drive, with an elegant drift into the new Confessional form. There is
a lack of rhyming, except accidentally, the stream of consciousness narrative often travels in immediate experience
and the song lyrics present as lyrical candy. The images contrast and celebrate nature with profound beauty and wisdom, as if
sunlight lights across a bare open space, opening the darkness. Sometimes the images brush with symbolism.
A fantastical poetry offering, a truthtelling of the N.A. diaspora, a beautiful celebration of the light despite the
darkness of ended love affairs, a lesson in survival. The life's work of one of the most gifted and celebrated Bards
of the New Age Renaissance Republique of Poetry. The words and music, the beautiful haunted lament, the beautiful love
song. Stranger Music by Leonard Cohen.
* A play by Samuel Beckett.
Available from Amazon Canada.
Amazon.ca.
Available from Amazon United States.
Amazon.com.
Available from Amazon United Kingdom.
Amazon.co.uk.
Genre: Poetry, New Age
