I'm Your
Man

Leonard Cohen used to like to tell the story of how his passion for poetry was ignited by a second-hand book of poems by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in a bookshop in Montreal. Aged 15, he opened the book and read the lines ‘I want to pass through the arches of Elvira, to see her thighs and begin weeping’. It was supposedly at this moment that the young Leonard Cohen knew that ‘there was another world and [he] wanted to be in it’, and it altered his life completely.

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By the time I decided that Leonard Cohen was my Federico Garcia Lorca, Cohen himself was an old man. He had spent his life searching for the arches, the thighs, and the tears; and, in the process, had produced a varied and unique body of work.