Narayanan Vivek Bücher

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 incalculable historical importance. But After does not just come after the Ramayana. On each successive page, Vivek Narayanan brings the resources of contemporary English poetry to bear on the Sanskrit epic. In a work that warrants comparison with Christopher Logue’s and Alice Oswald’s reshapings of Homer, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Narayanan allows the ancient voice of the poem to engage with modern experience, initiating a transformative conversation across time.

'Life and Times of Mr S' worked for me like magic. It unsettled my notion of what was real, what possible, and resettled that notion in a strange luminous place. Narayanan uses what he sees as singular illusions - class, caste, family, for example - to conjure a "pluriverse" of his own, crowded with multiple, often polymorphous identities that, by their very nature, could be illusions too. This recalls the work (and play) of magician-acrobats and Narayanan is one of them. Questioning the very nature of reality and the possibility of finding true answers, he pushes at limits, walking a dangerous tightrope. I am dazzled by his dexterity.'-Adil Jussawalla 'This unique and captivating book takes the experiments of G.V. Desani as a starting point and composes a chronicle of living language enacted around the person of Mr S. Lyric and narrative, parodic and reflective, Vivek Narayanan gives us a work of "woof-confidence" rich with mini-disquisitions on desire, guilt, food, caste, malls, etc. It jiggles the hearticles, slugs back the memory jug, and palavers with a laptop. Often on the heels of a round of elaborate, ebullient passages, the reader is brought to a complete stop: "Only in mind's stillness shall the wood apple appear." 'Life and Times of Mr S is a brilliant homage to an ever-morphing language and land.' -C.D. Wright