Elegy For My Beat Generation by Neeli Cherkovski / Lithic Press / 978-0-9975017-9-7
The Beat Generation as a literary phenomenon was over, or more correctly, was completed, with the last works of Jack Kerouac.
Its poetical and prose heritage, although it concerns, at most, works of only five or six people, is particularly important. The first echo of this generation, or the first generation which was essentially developed through the works of the Beats, has also now completed its cycle, and for some years now has been assigned to the history of modern American literature.
One of the most important, if not the most prominent descendant of this generation, is Neeli Cherkovski, who is also one of the most important lyrical American poets.
Neeli Cherkovski, who began his publishing career in the late 1960s, has delivered an extensive series of eclectic and lyrical poems which are among the best and most representative of its kind.
His latest collection of poems, titled Elegy for My Beat Generation published by Lithic Press, seems to be a farewell nod, composed of lyrics that compliment creative passion, lyricism, and the poets whom he admired and thought very highly of. Yet I believe that this is something that the readers must not be concerned about.
What’s important here is that Cherkovski has compressed much of his life’s panorama in this collection of poems, and these poems carry the classical bardic spirit wonderfully combined with everything he had, in the long run of his life, inherited from the works of the Beat poets.
These poems deserve to be read for another more special reason: Neeli Cherkovski is perhaps the only contemporary American poet who interweaves with such vigor and clarity the spirit of the troubadours in our modern times.
Paris 2017
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