Envoi …

… The Dying Light by Chris Moss | Poetry Magazine. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

With his last book, The Flame, Cohen blows out the candle on a career that has been long, wavering, intermittently brilliant. Despite publishing around a dozen poetry collections and two novels, he was never able to commit to words without music. In the foreword, his son, Adam, writes, “My father, before he was anything else, was a poet. He regarded this vocation, as he records in his notebooks, as some ‘mission from G-d.’” (The dash echoes the Jewish use of the vowelless YHWH.) Adam quotes Cohen’s confession that “nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing,” and believes his father regretted sacrificing so much of his time to folk song and the fame it brought him.