Various Positions by Ira B. Nadel

in
The Spice-Box of Earth
. All six poems reappeared in
The Spice-Box of Earth
four years later.
The Phoenix
only survived one issue, April 1957.But Cohen had again taken control of the means of production, as he haddone with his book
Let Us Compare Mythologies
.
    Cohen continued to write in New York, occasionally finding New York subjects, like the nearbyRiverside Church. An unpublished poem reads:
    Riverside Church frightens tourists
    with a giant carillion
    but is less successful with God
    whose ear grew deaf after
    a century of martyrsand Bach in bells is dubious
    It is a stunned Babel
    I told this to a small carved monk
    who held a bent stone.
    The key event of his year in New York was meeting Anne Sherman, a tall, dark-haired woman whom he first encountered at International House. Cohen was immediately struck by her beauty. She possessed a grace that originated in something “durable, disciplined and athletic.” She became the model for the divorcée Shell in
The Favorite Game
and occupied Cohen’s erotic and literary imagination. Her beauty devastated him, a beauty that broke down “old rules of light andcannot be interpreted or compared. They [such women] make every room original;” she was, as the novel describes, “formal” and well-educated, and she always presented “the scene the heart demanded.” But if she taught Cohen about love and behavior, he taught her “about her body and her beauty.”
    But the relationship with Sherman didn’t last. She was older than Cohen, she wasn’t Jewish, and she evidently chose not to continue the affair, although Cohen frequently expressed his love for her after their relationship ended. She had become friends with Cohen’s sister and with his friend Yafa Lerner, both of whom were then living in New York. Those close to Cohen at the time believed he wanted to marry Anne but she sought a stability that Cohen could not provide. He wanted her to come to Greece after he settled there in 1960 but she remained in New York, eventually marrying a prominent restaurateur.
    Sherman embodied all of the sexual freedom and guiltless love that Cohen had had difficulty finding in other women. For the next five or six years, Cohen continued to write about her in both poetry and prose. A notebook from the summer of 1958 contains a series of references to Sherman as well as the poem “To Anne in the Window Seat,” which expresses his grief over having to live without her. In a white notebook from Greece dated September 1961, there is a poem entitled “To Anne”:
    I’d no sooner forget you
    than pretty houses or legends
    or success
    But sometimes Meadowheart
    is lost, Isolde is lost,
    the new apartment is lost
    and I’m invisible
    in the cold machines of universe
    that won’t stop
    or slow to let you kiss.
    In the same notebook he adds:
    Reader, I am anxious about
    your discipline
    are you constant as me?
    Otherwise, burn this book
    Go to the movies
    if you aren’t doubled up with laughing.
    If Freda Guttman was the muse for
Let Us Compare Mythologies
, Anne Sherman was the inspiration for
Beauty at Close Quarters
, the unpublished version of
The Favorite Game
, as well as for
The Spice-Box of Earth
, which has its origin in Jewish tradition and contemporary love. “For Anne,” a brief poem in
The Spice-Box of Earth
, records this appreciation and her departure. In a letter of July 1961 to his sister, Cohen writes, “I would appreciate hearing any news about Anne. If you are in contact with her and she is interested please make a book available to her. It is sad, absurd and understandable, that the ‘onlie begetter’ of these poems should not have a volume in her possession.” His sister wrote back in November, saying that Anne was well. “Your report that Anne is happy delighted me. Besides being an extraordinary beauty, she is an extraordinary person and such people often have great difficulty adjusting to the bleak terms that any life presents, no matter how rich and