Meditation on Love, Life and Death in the Works of Leonard Cohen

My review of Absent Friend by John McKenna

It begins with the author discovering Cohen’s music after a near fatal encounter with teenage meningitis. It ends with the production of a requiem mass on which he collaborated with the Canadian singer-songwriter.

Part memoir — there are inevitably glimpses into the author’s own life — part biography — Cohen’s alcoholism, his period living the ascetic life of a Buddhist monk and the abuse suffered at the hands of his former manager, Kelly Lynch, all feature — Absent Friend is the Irish author’s homage to the man he describes as full of style, grace and humility.

Anyone who has attended McKenna’s lectures in creative writing, or his many workshops, will be familiar with his reverence for Cohen. He uses Cohen’s lyrics, alongside those of contemporaries such as Janis Joplin and Ray Carver, as examples of the kind of insightful, questioning, work to which all writers ought to aspire. It is a practice he began as a teacher of English and History in a secondary school in his native County Kildare in the late 1970s.

He left that job to take up a role as radio producer with Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE. It was this that gave him the first opportunity to meet Cohen the man. He recalls…