Book of Mercy

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

As a young man Leonard Cohen was the lyric poet of McGill; he swiftly grew as a writer into a famous dark romantic and a popular singer of ballads. Book of Mercy, first published in 1984 and now reprinted, comprises 50 prose poems directed towards a superior being or Name (and termed “psalms” in the book cover). The whole work was evidently poised upon the occasion of Cohen’s 50th birthday. It represents a new stage, therefore, in his development. The dark note of melancholy which has always been felt in his work continues and deepens; the expressions of humility, too, fit with past introspections. Alongside appeals for mercy and expressions of guilt there also runs through these poems a spirit of combativeness, of assertion, and the occasionally wicked flashing phrase which suggests that the complex personality of the writer has not wholly been cast into a rigid frame of spiritual acceptance and meekness. We may expect further developments.