Narayanan, Vivek: After

New York Review Books, paperback

Publication Date: July 12, 2022

Publisher Marketing: Valmiki's Ramayana provides the inspiration for this vibrant collection of poems, each of which acts as a persuasive encounter between English poetry and Indian myth.

After is a collection of poems inspired by Valmiki's Ramayana, one of Asia's foundational epic poems and a story-cycle of formative historical importance all across South and Southeast Asia.

On the Indian subcontinent, the Ramayana is not only central to religion and folklore but to the conduct of life. People take its characters as models of vice and virtue, courage and devotion, and politicians have been known to take advantage of the veneration in which the book is held. In the West, too, the Ramayana has long been recognized as one of the essential classics of world literature, on par with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Homeric epics, Virgil, and Dante, even as its stories remain comparatively unfamiliar.

In After Vivek Narayanan brings the resources of contemporary English poetry to bear on Valmiki's Ramayana. In a work that bears comparison with Christopher Logue and Alice Oswald's distinctive reshapings of Homer, and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, Narayanan allows the ancient voice of the poem to confront and engage with modern experience, initiating a transformative conversation across time.