i have a library card...

I was filled with joy, like I had graduated to another plain of existence, like I truly had been given a passport into Bookland and was unbound from the seedy coat of ownership.  This was bliss - folk music and books of reptiles, poetry.


Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen
I can't say how much I enjoyed this collection of personal psalms.  They are tied to the Hebrew tradition through form, using the repetition of words as opposed to modern lyrical rhyming structure, though there are internal rhymes in many of the poems.  Poem 8 of book I demonstrates this especially well, the word "fall" the repeated refrain and the theme, God upholding the falling as the "master of the human accident".  Repeated usage of light/ dark, affirmation, chairs, birth, song - a unified work which displays faucet upon faucet of rich feeling and spiritual hunger.  God is not only called the Most High, the "father of mercy", but the "magnet of the falling cherry petals".  Cohen is simply eloquent and raw, his language full of movement and rhythm, his emotional material as varied as the Psalms which influenced this work.


                                "You let me sing, you lifted
me up, you gave my soul a beam to travel on. You
folded your distance back into my heart.  You drew
the tears back to my eyes.  You hid me in the moun-
tain of your word.  You gave the injury a tongue to
heal itself.  You covered my head with my teacher's
care, you bound my arm with my grandfather's
strength.  O beloved speaking, O comfort whispering
in the terror, unspeakable explanation of the smoke
and cruelty, undo the self-conspiracy, let me dare
the boldness of joy." ~ 19, Book of Mercy