Monday 14th September

I must admit this was an impulse buy; it was about Leonard and so I got it on Kindle.  I am not sure exactly what I was expecting; some revelation maybe, some shared experience, maybe a few snippets of the real Leonard, who knows.  But I wasn’t really expecting the book I got.  I should have realized by the author’s name, it was obviously Jewish; not that that should have mattered, except that the whole book is really a disquisition on Leonard’s Jewish roots and his interpretation of, repudiation at times and final reconciliation with Judaism rather than trying to understand just how he wrote such wonderful poetry, such apposite lines and how his voice, deep and resonant meshes so beautifully with those words, in other words how the magic works.  There is actually quite a long disquisition about Canadian poetry, or rather the lack of it, and Canadian poets in the Twentieth Century, but without reading their works (which I have no intention of doing) they are just names on a piece of paper.  Likewise the investigations into the roots of Leonard’s Jewish beliefs are again lost on one who isn’t vaguely interested in the differing schools of Judaism.

There are some good passages in the book however and it does take us approximately chronologically through his career, but I learned little I did not actually know, and strangely despite the intellectual theorizing I came no closer to understanding the magic of Leonard’s songs.  Which actually, is maybe just how it should be – when the conjouror reveals his sleight of hand there is always some disappointment.  At school I always rebelled against the analysis of poetry, things like meter and onomatopoeia and alliteration happen naturally when you write poetry, they don’t need analysing.  The wonderful thing about Leonard’s poetry are the original lines, always with a twist in them like “the skylight is like skin for a drum I’ll never mend” or “Jesus was a sailor and he walked upon the water, he said all men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.” Or “Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my own way to be free.”  There is nothing like them in modern music, even Dylan’s poetry doesn’t have these depths of meaning or beauty.  Anyway, even though the book revealed little for me, it was interesting, but unless you are a complete Leonard obsessive I would avoid it…