Latest from the Blog
Don’t be afraid: “Seamus Heaney & the Music of What Happens” (Arena, BBC2; dir. Adam Low)
The documentary opens with his daughter, Catherine, talking about his death and in that sense is structured like a traditional obituary. She recounts that his final text to her mother (his wife, Marie), ended, Noli Timere. Don’t be afraid (a Latin phrase that comes down to us as a kind of refrain in the Gospels).…
The Lord of Song: “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song”
Before Cohen and Lissauer went into the studio to record, the song had already had an early life of its own – a kind of painful adolescence. Light recounts the story of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen meeting in Paris. “Dylan asked me how long it took me to write,” Cohen reported. “I told him…
“When they poured across the border:” Reflections on Leonard Cohen & Ilya Kaminsky
I’ve just finished reading Sylvie Simmons’ excellent biography, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, and have been reflecting on the magnificent sweep of his career.
Main image: Lewis Chessmen © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Blog content: © Benedict Gilbert 2021
Benedict Gilbert poems 