After

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.

Vivek Narayanan is one of the best-known Indian poets writing in English. His books of poetry include Universal Beach and Life and Times of Mr S. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. A full-length collection of his poems in Swedish translation was published in 2015 by the legendary Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand. He currently teaches creative writing at George Mason University and is a member of the editorial board at Poetry Daily, where he helps to select poems and writes short essays about world poetry.