Canongate Books strana 27 z 27

What did your face look like before your parents were born? Who are you? What is your true self? These are the questions in Ruth Ozeki's mind as she challenges herself to spend three hours gazing into her own reflection, recording every thought and detail. What follows are a lifetime's worth of meditations on race, ageing, family, death, the body, self-doubt and, finally, acceptance. In this profound encounter with memory and the mirror, Ozeki weaves together personal history, professional experience, Zen philosophy, Japanese culture and more to paint a rich, intimate and utterly unique portrait of a life as told through a face.

The poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions. Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is revered as one of the greatest writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of the last hundred years.