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Jun 18, 2016ansoneesf rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
In Neeli Cherkovski's poetry there is a vitality and a trangressive whimsical streak that can be traced back to the literary enfante terible Rimbaud and Whitman's refreshing poetic bluntness, needless to say, he packs a strong punch. He has nurtured his own poetic voice over the years and writes volumes and volumes of poems- he is a poetic automated press, spitting out poems of enduring quality and with the authority of having walked alongside many literary greats. He is a poet of travel and languages, of multiple cultural experiences, forever discovering himself alongside the reader. Mr. Cherkovski must be one of the hardest working septuagenarian poets in San Francisco, who does not seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. He still has a lot of wonderful moments to share. Let's support him by reading his poetry, attending his frequent local readings and, in so doing, keep poetry alive and well in San Francisco. In the poetry collection From The Canyon Outward, the poet tackles the moral paradox of having to destroy his gods as a way to discover the indestructible transformations of the gods into the natural world; in his poems, he often breaks from the gods at the same moment he embraces their inner truth, their vitality that perpetuates eternally in the living breathing world around him. As an iconoclast, he becomes a true believer of the sacred in the body and in connecting with nature, often the fecundity of both the body and nature coming together in a ecstatic moment of realization. His fallen gods are often his fallen heroes, a foolish monk who frozen to death, his mentor Charles Bukowski, Lorca, John Landry, all dissidents in one form or another, engaging the political world via the natural one, how bodies engage with the natural world around them through the hopes and hypocrisies of human nature and amid intimations of unrest among the trees and canyons. The collection, as a whole, plays out like a map to the human heart, delineated by the narrative that nature has to tell to those willing to listen, show those willing to observe carefully.