Some writers mythologize, raising everyday life to levels of cosmic significance, finding awful natural cycles in happenstance, wisdom in emotional upheaval.

Others de-mythologize, undercutting pretension, revealing the human and petty that underlie grand ideas, the mundane and the capricious in the seemingly awesome.

Leonard Cohen does both. His poetry, prose and song celebrate the play between the spiritual, profound and historical on one hand and the profane, petty and personal on the other—often within a single image. Christ pinned like a butterfly. A drunk in a midnight choir. A stuttering God.

Personally I prefer the secularizing Cohen. But he has certainly struck a chord with a lot of people. And many a phrase catches and intrigues me, despite my cynicism.

It began with this book, Let Us Compare Mythologies. Mythologies, indeed. It is full of personal and public legends, but presented in simple, elegant language, in the rhythms of a person whispering confessions into your ear. Immediately accessible and mysterious at the same time. Take the simple, complex act of love-making, for instance. In the poem "Letter", quoted in the sidebar at left, it is a relationship of both great significance and cynicism, a ceremony, a game of diplomacy, an alliance of enemies. But in "The Fly", he recounts finding an insect crawling up his sleeping lover's thigh:

And it ruined my day —
     this fly which never planned
to charm her or to please
should walk boldly on that ground
     I tried so hard
to lay my trembling knees.

Other poems are shot through with Christian religious imagery, as words like "consecrated", "prayers" and "saviours" occur in unexpected contexts alongside secular images. Sometimes they are brilliantly appropriate as in the poem about Irving Layton, "To I.P.L.", in which his fellow poet and sometimes mentor is portrayed as a thundering rebel against angels (probably Layton's self-image too). But in other cases the words appear to have been thrown in as an attempt to lend profound effect. Cohen seems content to use the surface trappings of religion without having any real interest in the substance of Christian or other creeds, at least in this collection. (Not necessarily a bad thing.)

In retrospect, now that the legend of the romantic young Bohemian has dissipated somewhat, the superficiality of some of the work can be seen more clearly perhaps. Several of the poems that seemed meaningful at the time now appear almost self-parody or obviously ironical in a Rod McKuenish way. To wit, the clever "Folk Song" in which the narrator has a bottle crafted to keep his lover's tears in but never uses it because "How could I know you could not cry?"

It is also apparent this is a young poet experimenting with styles, though more assuredly than most any other 15 to 22-year-old you might have read. Poems are mainly in free verse with a conversational or singing rhythm, but also include prose, rhymes, half-rhymes and other techniques.

Overall though it is a brilliantly accomplished, moving and intriguing collection of poems, whose mythological threads develop a sweetly melancholic atmosphere you can enter into at any time.

You may not be able to find this book easily these days as the last reprint I believe was in 1966 (one of the 400 first editions from 1956 is said to be worth $1,000 now). The best poems are included in later Leonard Cohen collections and selections.

— Eric