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If you’ve got it handy, pull out your copy of Songs of Leonard Cohen — LP or CD, though the former is better, being bigger — and look at the back cover. The image there, often assumed to depict Joan of Arc being burned at the stake, is in fact a piece of Mexican religious folk art, chosen by Cohen to represent, in his words, “the triumph of spirit over matter — the spirit being that beautiful woman breaking out of the chains and fire and prison.”

Fire and flame are multi-purpose motifs throughout Cohen’s writings and songs — so much so that when it came time to choose a title for the book of poems and other writings on which he was working feverishly right up until his death on Nov. 7, 2016, son Adam Cohen was in no doubt.

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“He lit the flames and he tended to them diligently,” writes Adam in his introduction to the book that now sees the light of day as The Flame: Poems and Selections from the Notebooks (McClelland & Stewart, 275 pp, $32.95).