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.

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 Autobigraphy of Red, Narayanan allows the ancient voice of the poem to confront and engage with modern experience, initiating a transformative conversation across time.

“A fantastic adventure story and a threnody on the sadness of power, the Ramayana has been multiplying across languages and formal boundaries for more than two millennia. And now it has taken a new shape in Vivek Narayanan’s formidable English:  Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Ravana flash across these floodlit pages. Ancient and contemporary India fracture and recompose in this timeless epic of sorrow, violence, betrayal, and longing, as if the poet Valmiki foresaw, centuries ago, that he would chant again in Narayanan’s voice.” —Rosanna Warren

“After is as multitudinous as the Sanskrit Ramayana, the text it is after (in both senses of the word), the text it follows (in both senses of the word). It is a conception in English of Valmiki’s great poem, a reflection of it, a concretion of it, a refraction of it, both an acceptance and a passionate refusal of it, a sometimes tender, sometimes violent embrace, a resurrection, an imprisonment, a liberation of it, and, always, an act of profoundly learned, current, and imaginative reverence. The only thing more amazing than Narayanan’s ambition is his realization of that ambition.” —Vijay Seshadri