Great Regulars: [Leonard Cohen's] early guitar albums do nothing

for me; as for his poetry, his first book is wonderful, but after that it's a game of diminishing returns. But I think what makes those two albums great is that Cohen was willing to undermine the most spectacular poetry he'd ever written with deliberately tacky orchestration. He'd finally found a musical form that embodied a lyric he'd been working on for years (and an ethos he'd been perfecting for a half-century): "Forget your perfect offering./There is a crack in everything,/That's how the light gets in."

from Michael Lista: National Post: On Poetry: I'm Your Man, by Sylvie Simmons

~~~~~~~~~~~