Flowers for Hitler

The first of Cohen's 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».
   
It's useful to think of Flowers for Hitler as the author auditioning himself for all the parts in an unwritten play. Useful because it underlines the process of self-recovery and self-discovery that is at the center of these poems. In a jacket-note Cohen says that these poems won't appeal to the reviewers who praised his previous (second) collection, The spice box of Earth (1961). But I suspect that anyone who really liked the latter in all its range of style and substance (that is, not just its lusher surfaces and sounds) will like Flowers for Hitler even better. From the new perspective what looks wrong with the earlier work is a kind of premature coming to terms with himself. In Flowers for Hitler Cohen isn't so much shifting his ground; he's trying to unjell himself before it's too late. He's taking a more searching and uncompromising look at the poetic substance that he exists on, at all the things that he can remember, imagine, absorb, separate, excrete, transmute, forget.
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