Flowers for Hitler

<b>To mark the publication of Leonard Cohen's final book, <i>The Flame</i>, McClelland & Stewart is proud to reissue six beautiful editions of Cohen's cherished early works of poetry. <br><br><i>A freshly packaged series for devoted Leonard Cohen fans and those who wish to discover one of the world's most adored and celebrated writers.</i></b><br><br>Originally published by McClelland & Stewart in 1964, <i>Flowers for Hitler</i> is Leonard Cohen's third collection of poetry, in which he first experiments with his self-consciously "anti-art" gestures: an attempt, in his own words, to move "from the world of the golden-boy poet into the dung pile of the front-line writer." Haunted by the image of the Nazi concentration camps, the poems are deliberately ugly, tasteless, and confrontational, setting out to destroy the image of Cohen as a sweet romantic poet. Its author was confident in his new direction, telling his publisher at the time that the collection was a masterpiece, and "there [had] never been a book like this, prose or poetry, written in Canada."