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After
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.
- GenresPoetry
624 pages, Paperback
Published July 19, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 28, 2023
It’s hard to know how to review this book. It tackles so much. I have only read it once because it’s due back at the library on ILL, but it would repay much longer study.
Narayanan writes beautiful modern versions of sections of the original poem. But he also uses the Ramayana as a jumping off point for exploring dozens of issues affecting India today. My knowledge of India is very limited, so what follows should be taken as impressions rather than educated commentary. I may have misunderstood or misremembered more than a little of the work.
I would say that, after spending the first half of the book on the monumental task of creating a wonderful modern impression of the epic, the most serious and pervasive part of his project in the second half is to portray extreme Hindu nationalism and attacks on Muslims as an echo of the violence of the Ramayana. He does this by setting the extreme violence of the war between Ravana and Rama against long lists of violent attacks on Muslim groups and individuals. He extends the relationship by discussing skin color in graphic versions of the Ramayana as it relates to caste and regional racism in India today. (Although he also notes the anomaly of dark-skinned deities upending this comparison.)
Narayanan also tackles the misogyny of the treatment of Sita at length. No one can read the Ramayana today without being repulsed by both Ravana’s and Rama’s actions regarding her. Narayanan describes his own disgust, and explores what Valmiki might have been trying to do.
In other sections Narayanan spins off in all kinds of directions. He walks through the existing parkland that is the presumed location of the forest Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita live in for many years, and becomes disoriented. He visits the site of the Babri Masjid mosque that was attacked in 1992, noting that its city Ayodhya, the presumed birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama, is now a ghost city. He visits a site full of Hindu shrines as pilgrims visit just before it is shut down for the season. He discusses his father’s last days. Each reflection is linked to the epic.
Yet the whole thing rests on the power of the Ramayana. The pulse beats throughout. Back and back he comes to create a modern version of the epic. It is a conundrum we know well in the West, as our culture draws time and again on the violence and misogyny of Homer and Virgil and Beowulf, and we are both horrified and in awe of the poetry and story.
Narayanan works mostly on the retelling in the first half of the book, and does the branching out in the second half. That is my recollection, at least, as I read it over three or four weeks. The poetry is beautiful, so it is worth reading simply for the language. I have been trying to find a brief description of the prosody that governs Sanskrit poetry like the Ramayana, but I can’t. I have to assume that Narayanan’s run on sentences and the caesuras follow tradition at least in part. I plan on buying a copy and rereading it just to savor the poetry. But I also hope to pick up more of the threads of his contemporary project and to read more of the work cited in the notes in the back. These are designed to help readers unfamiliar with the context of both the epic and his modern issues.
Recommended.
Narayanan writes beautiful modern versions of sections of the original poem. But he also uses the Ramayana as a jumping off point for exploring dozens of issues affecting India today. My knowledge of India is very limited, so what follows should be taken as impressions rather than educated commentary. I may have misunderstood or misremembered more than a little of the work.
I would say that, after spending the first half of the book on the monumental task of creating a wonderful modern impression of the epic, the most serious and pervasive part of his project in the second half is to portray extreme Hindu nationalism and attacks on Muslims as an echo of the violence of the Ramayana. He does this by setting the extreme violence of the war between Ravana and Rama against long lists of violent attacks on Muslim groups and individuals. He extends the relationship by discussing skin color in graphic versions of the Ramayana as it relates to caste and regional racism in India today. (Although he also notes the anomaly of dark-skinned deities upending this comparison.)
Narayanan also tackles the misogyny of the treatment of Sita at length. No one can read the Ramayana today without being repulsed by both Ravana’s and Rama’s actions regarding her. Narayanan describes his own disgust, and explores what Valmiki might have been trying to do.
In other sections Narayanan spins off in all kinds of directions. He walks through the existing parkland that is the presumed location of the forest Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita live in for many years, and becomes disoriented. He visits the site of the Babri Masjid mosque that was attacked in 1992, noting that its city Ayodhya, the presumed birthplace of the Hindu deity Rama, is now a ghost city. He visits a site full of Hindu shrines as pilgrims visit just before it is shut down for the season. He discusses his father’s last days. Each reflection is linked to the epic.
Yet the whole thing rests on the power of the Ramayana. The pulse beats throughout. Back and back he comes to create a modern version of the epic. It is a conundrum we know well in the West, as our culture draws time and again on the violence and misogyny of Homer and Virgil and Beowulf, and we are both horrified and in awe of the poetry and story.
Narayanan works mostly on the retelling in the first half of the book, and does the branching out in the second half. That is my recollection, at least, as I read it over three or four weeks. The poetry is beautiful, so it is worth reading simply for the language. I have been trying to find a brief description of the prosody that governs Sanskrit poetry like the Ramayana, but I can’t. I have to assume that Narayanan’s run on sentences and the caesuras follow tradition at least in part. I plan on buying a copy and rereading it just to savor the poetry. But I also hope to pick up more of the threads of his contemporary project and to read more of the work cited in the notes in the back. These are designed to help readers unfamiliar with the context of both the epic and his modern issues.
Recommended.
Ravana
Radiating gloom. Like an asteroid with designs on a star
Like night’s curved shadow that swims across the Earth
Like the darkness of our Sun in its deepest explosions…
Like the planet Budhan about to take hold of Rohini…
They Saw No Longer the Battlefield
and then like the blindness of fury in WAR
a solid rising column of iron-coloured dirt &
skin & blood & hair & pollen & chondrite
buffeted in the ten directions both
(Simiarakshsasa) sides. All
beings tossed in it----
and they saw no longer the battlefield
only nebulas of dust. Red rust
or white. Whiter than white people or
the white of silk. Then nothing
not limb nor cloth nor banner
nor horse nor blade
nor chariot nor bow. In
that wretched dreck
the sound of the roaring ones & the attacking ones
split the ears
To Shaheen Bagh, In absentia
…
[includes this translation of a song by Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, sung at the U.N. in 1966]
Grow friendship at the heart
See other souls as you see your own
Give up war. Give up competition
Give up the acquisition or occupation by force
Invent. Thrash out & make real
The three da’s:
damayata dattu dayadhvam
--restraint charity mercy—
& prosperity for all the peoples
December 25, 2022
Even though I have read several retellings of the epic Ramayana from the perspective of different characters, I have never really read the actual work, or even a translated one, written by Valmiki. And that is the reason why this book, “after” by Vivek Narayanan, which is a collection of poetry inspired by Ramayana written by Valmiki, grabbed my attention so much.
Lyrical and all-encompassing, these poetic verses are a means through which the author has tried to channel the classic literary depth of the epic tale, giving it a contemporary edge throughout.
For literary enthusiasts reveling in the complexity of classical and modern literature, this collection of poetry would be an enthralling read. However, it proved to be a difficult piece of literature to comprehend for me. In general. I enjoy reading poetry a lot but somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to go through this book in its entirety without feeling overwhelmed halfway.
I gave it a try again after a few days but still couldn’t grasp the meaning behind those lines and finally, I decided that this book is not for me.
I wouldn’t suggest this book to amateur poetry lovers but if you are a literary enthusiast of complex poetic representations, then you can definitely give this book a go.
Lyrical and all-encompassing, these poetic verses are a means through which the author has tried to channel the classic literary depth of the epic tale, giving it a contemporary edge throughout.
For literary enthusiasts reveling in the complexity of classical and modern literature, this collection of poetry would be an enthralling read. However, it proved to be a difficult piece of literature to comprehend for me. In general. I enjoy reading poetry a lot but somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to go through this book in its entirety without feeling overwhelmed halfway.
I gave it a try again after a few days but still couldn’t grasp the meaning behind those lines and finally, I decided that this book is not for me.
I wouldn’t suggest this book to amateur poetry lovers but if you are a literary enthusiast of complex poetic representations, then you can definitely give this book a go.
December 30, 2025
i feel like i just did seven lines of illicit drugs
April 4, 2026
After, published by New York Review Books in 2022 and the labour of a decade, is Vivek Narayanan's most ambitious and most fully realised work to date. At over five hundred pages of new poems, it is a vast, restless, formally inventive reimagining of Valmiki's Ramayana — one of the foundational epics of South and Southeast Asia and a story cycle that has been retold across hundreds of languages, traditions, and centuries. Narayanan, one of the most distinguished Indian poets writing in English today, does not attempt a translation, a retelling, or a straightforward modernisation. What he offers is something harder to name and more interesting: a sustained critical conversation with a source text that he loves, questions, inhabits, and refuses to leave alone.
The Source and Its Complexity
To understand what Narayanan is doing, it helps to understand what the Ramayana is and is not. Valmiki's text — the earliest surviving version, though the story is older still — follows the prince Rama through fourteen years of exile, the abduction of his wife Sita by the demon king Ravana, and the war fought to reclaim her.
Valmiki is known as the Adi Kavi, the First Poet, and his version holds a special religious and cultural authority by virtue of its Sanskrit and its age. But the Ramayana is not a fixed text with a single authoritative meaning. Scholars have identified hundreds of distinct versions across languages and traditions — Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, devotional, feminist, and anti-caste — and the story has proven endlessly available for retelling precisely because it contains within itself so many irresolvable tensions.
Rama does things the ideal hero should not do. He kills the monkey king Vali by shooting him from behind a tree, an act of dubious honour. He sends Sita away from him twice — first into exile before she is rescued, and again after their return, in response to rumours of infidelity he knows to be false. These moments have troubled readers and tellers of the Ramayana for two millennia. Narayanan is not the first to sit with this trouble; he is working within a tradition that has always made the story's ethical difficulty part of its meaning. But the way he sits with it — the range of poetic registers he brings to bear, the willingness to linger, digress, and return — is distinctively his own.
Method and Form
Narayanan describes his approach as a reinvention or rewiring of the source text, achieved through what he calls a critical conversation with Valmiki. The book loosely follows the structure of Valmiki's seven books, compressing them into four sections, but it does not proceed with any obligation to completeness. Some episodes are retold multiple times from different angles; others are skipped entirely. Some poems inhabit a specific moment from the epic with lyric intensity; others use the epic's motifs as a launching point for meditations on entirely different material — the experience of reading, the nature of translation, the poet's own life pressing against the mythological frame.
The free verse line Narayanan employs is described by one reviewer as fine and tight as wire — an apt phrase for writing that is taut without being rigid, that bends under pressure and springs back. The poems have range: they can be fierce and documentary in their violence, tender in their attention to grief, funny in their digressive asides, and scholarly in their willingness to expose the apparatus of translation and commentary. The book includes generous notes that keep the surrounding scholarship in view without allowing the academic apparatus to swallow the poetry. This transparency about sources and method is itself part of the work's argument — the scaffolding remains visible because Narayanan wants the reader to see how the house was built.
The Contemporary Intrusion
One of the book's most politically charged gestures is its refusal to keep ancient and modern cleanly separated. The moral and emotional crises of the Ramayana — exile, abduction, war, loyalty tested to its limits, justice that looks unsettlingly like injustice — are delivered through images and language that belong unmistakably to the present: guerrillas, motorcycles, cell phones, censorship, Maoists, state violence, the migrant poor. Where the original epic made warfare beautiful through extended simile and largely elided its cruelty, Narayanan's After refuses to aestheticise violence. The brutality that currently occurs in South Asia at both state and communal levels finds its way into these pages without apology.
This contemporary intrusion is not applied superficially as a modernising trick. It emerges from a conviction that the Ramayana's ethical problems — the failure of the dharmic ideal, the suffering of the innocent, the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is — are not historical curiosities but living questions. Towards the end of the book, this becomes most explicit, as poems speak to violence in Kashmir and anxiety about environmental destruction. The ancient story becomes a lens through which very recent catastrophes are examined, and the examination illuminates both.
The Question of Sita
Within the long tradition of Ramayana retellings, Sita's story has often been the contested centre — the place where questions of gender, voice, and justice press most urgently. Women poets and storytellers across centuries have found in Sita a figure whose suffering demands reckoning, and whose silence under that suffering is itself a form of speech. Narayanan's After is alert to this tradition, and to the feminist retellings that have used Sita's perspective to question the epic's governing assumptions. While this is not exclusively a book about Sita, her presence as a figure who is repeatedly required to prove herself to a husband who has already been proved unworthy of that requirement gives the book much of its ethical weight.
Comparisons and Context
Reviewers have placed After in distinguished company: Christopher Logue's War Music, his four-decade reimagining of the Iliad; Alice Oswald's Memorial, which stripped the Iliad back to its death catalogue and its similes; Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, which transplanted the myth of Geryon into the contemporary. These are the books that have most successfully shown what it looks like to take an ancient epic seriously as living material — not a museum piece to be faithfully reproduced but a repository of human experience to be genuinely argued with. After belongs in this conversation, while being unmistakably itself: rooted in an Indian literary tradition, answering to an Indian political present, written by a poet who grew up with the Ramayana around him and has spent decades thinking hard about what it means to return to it.
Final Thoughts
After is one of the most significant works of English-language poetry to emerge from the Indian subcontinent in recent decades, and one of the most serious engagements with the Ramayana as a living literary and political resource that any poet has yet produced in English. It is not an easy book — it is long, formally demanding, and assumes a reader willing to wander alongside it through digressions and uncertainties. But the effort is generously rewarded. Narayanan's willingness to love the source text and dispute it simultaneously, to inhabit the ancient and the contemporary in the same breath, produces poetry of genuine force and genuine beauty — a book that, like the tradition it draws from, does not resolve so much as it deepens.
The Source and Its Complexity
To understand what Narayanan is doing, it helps to understand what the Ramayana is and is not. Valmiki's text — the earliest surviving version, though the story is older still — follows the prince Rama through fourteen years of exile, the abduction of his wife Sita by the demon king Ravana, and the war fought to reclaim her.
Valmiki is known as the Adi Kavi, the First Poet, and his version holds a special religious and cultural authority by virtue of its Sanskrit and its age. But the Ramayana is not a fixed text with a single authoritative meaning. Scholars have identified hundreds of distinct versions across languages and traditions — Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, devotional, feminist, and anti-caste — and the story has proven endlessly available for retelling precisely because it contains within itself so many irresolvable tensions.
Rama does things the ideal hero should not do. He kills the monkey king Vali by shooting him from behind a tree, an act of dubious honour. He sends Sita away from him twice — first into exile before she is rescued, and again after their return, in response to rumours of infidelity he knows to be false. These moments have troubled readers and tellers of the Ramayana for two millennia. Narayanan is not the first to sit with this trouble; he is working within a tradition that has always made the story's ethical difficulty part of its meaning. But the way he sits with it — the range of poetic registers he brings to bear, the willingness to linger, digress, and return — is distinctively his own.
Method and Form
Narayanan describes his approach as a reinvention or rewiring of the source text, achieved through what he calls a critical conversation with Valmiki. The book loosely follows the structure of Valmiki's seven books, compressing them into four sections, but it does not proceed with any obligation to completeness. Some episodes are retold multiple times from different angles; others are skipped entirely. Some poems inhabit a specific moment from the epic with lyric intensity; others use the epic's motifs as a launching point for meditations on entirely different material — the experience of reading, the nature of translation, the poet's own life pressing against the mythological frame.
The free verse line Narayanan employs is described by one reviewer as fine and tight as wire — an apt phrase for writing that is taut without being rigid, that bends under pressure and springs back. The poems have range: they can be fierce and documentary in their violence, tender in their attention to grief, funny in their digressive asides, and scholarly in their willingness to expose the apparatus of translation and commentary. The book includes generous notes that keep the surrounding scholarship in view without allowing the academic apparatus to swallow the poetry. This transparency about sources and method is itself part of the work's argument — the scaffolding remains visible because Narayanan wants the reader to see how the house was built.
The Contemporary Intrusion
One of the book's most politically charged gestures is its refusal to keep ancient and modern cleanly separated. The moral and emotional crises of the Ramayana — exile, abduction, war, loyalty tested to its limits, justice that looks unsettlingly like injustice — are delivered through images and language that belong unmistakably to the present: guerrillas, motorcycles, cell phones, censorship, Maoists, state violence, the migrant poor. Where the original epic made warfare beautiful through extended simile and largely elided its cruelty, Narayanan's After refuses to aestheticise violence. The brutality that currently occurs in South Asia at both state and communal levels finds its way into these pages without apology.
This contemporary intrusion is not applied superficially as a modernising trick. It emerges from a conviction that the Ramayana's ethical problems — the failure of the dharmic ideal, the suffering of the innocent, the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is — are not historical curiosities but living questions. Towards the end of the book, this becomes most explicit, as poems speak to violence in Kashmir and anxiety about environmental destruction. The ancient story becomes a lens through which very recent catastrophes are examined, and the examination illuminates both.
The Question of Sita
Within the long tradition of Ramayana retellings, Sita's story has often been the contested centre — the place where questions of gender, voice, and justice press most urgently. Women poets and storytellers across centuries have found in Sita a figure whose suffering demands reckoning, and whose silence under that suffering is itself a form of speech. Narayanan's After is alert to this tradition, and to the feminist retellings that have used Sita's perspective to question the epic's governing assumptions. While this is not exclusively a book about Sita, her presence as a figure who is repeatedly required to prove herself to a husband who has already been proved unworthy of that requirement gives the book much of its ethical weight.
Comparisons and Context
Reviewers have placed After in distinguished company: Christopher Logue's War Music, his four-decade reimagining of the Iliad; Alice Oswald's Memorial, which stripped the Iliad back to its death catalogue and its similes; Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, which transplanted the myth of Geryon into the contemporary. These are the books that have most successfully shown what it looks like to take an ancient epic seriously as living material — not a museum piece to be faithfully reproduced but a repository of human experience to be genuinely argued with. After belongs in this conversation, while being unmistakably itself: rooted in an Indian literary tradition, answering to an Indian political present, written by a poet who grew up with the Ramayana around him and has spent decades thinking hard about what it means to return to it.
Final Thoughts
After is one of the most significant works of English-language poetry to emerge from the Indian subcontinent in recent decades, and one of the most serious engagements with the Ramayana as a living literary and political resource that any poet has yet produced in English. It is not an easy book — it is long, formally demanding, and assumes a reader willing to wander alongside it through digressions and uncertainties. But the effort is generously rewarded. Narayanan's willingness to love the source text and dispute it simultaneously, to inhabit the ancient and the contemporary in the same breath, produces poetry of genuine force and genuine beauty — a book that, like the tradition it draws from, does not resolve so much as it deepens.
October 16, 2025
I hope to circle back with a longer review when I have time, but let me just say: this book is incredible, far better than I could have imagined when I picked it up on a whim. If you're considering reading this, because you like poetry, or classics, or have a specific interest in the Ramayana, or you're just openminded and curious about the world - absolutely do it. I can't recommend this highly enough.
If I were somehow asked to teach a poetry course (unlikely in this lifetime), I could easily spend a semester focused on this book alone. So much to unpack, and every layer is breathtaking. For a book ostensibly retelling a foundational epic poem, the depth of invention is astonishing. We have straightforward narrative poetry, more or less retelling and translating the Ramayana through a proper poetic lens; we have experimental visual poems; works of erasure drawing from modern sources; detours into something like confessional poetry; juxtapositions between ancient and modern history; and stunning lyric poetry. Beyond what this book is - which is a behemoth assemblage of ideas, stories, myths, and more - the language is musical, inventive, playful, horrifying, heartfelt, all of it.
The third book focused on "War", and in particular the long segment within called "The Poem Without Beginning or End", is unbelievably powerful, haunting in the most visceral sense. By the time you get to the final section, "After", you've experienced an entire world, and you're treated to a fascinating comedown as the long-parted characters struggle to reconnect, spurn one another (despite all the fighting, loss and pain that led here), and eventually, awkwardly, come back together. Despite the epic scope, these characters of legend are still human and small, just as we all are.
I read this slowly to savor the individual pieces, but I could have just as easily torn through it like an experimental novel, despite the length.
Read it, share it, then come back and read it again. I plan to. I've already begun hunting down more of Narayanan's poetry, and I've started accumulating some of the source materials he drew from (I lucked upon a rare English-language copy of Magadh by Shrikant Verma, and it's beautiful). There is an entire world inside this book, and it will lead you to other worlds.
If I were somehow asked to teach a poetry course (unlikely in this lifetime), I could easily spend a semester focused on this book alone. So much to unpack, and every layer is breathtaking. For a book ostensibly retelling a foundational epic poem, the depth of invention is astonishing. We have straightforward narrative poetry, more or less retelling and translating the Ramayana through a proper poetic lens; we have experimental visual poems; works of erasure drawing from modern sources; detours into something like confessional poetry; juxtapositions between ancient and modern history; and stunning lyric poetry. Beyond what this book is - which is a behemoth assemblage of ideas, stories, myths, and more - the language is musical, inventive, playful, horrifying, heartfelt, all of it.
The third book focused on "War", and in particular the long segment within called "The Poem Without Beginning or End", is unbelievably powerful, haunting in the most visceral sense. By the time you get to the final section, "After", you've experienced an entire world, and you're treated to a fascinating comedown as the long-parted characters struggle to reconnect, spurn one another (despite all the fighting, loss and pain that led here), and eventually, awkwardly, come back together. Despite the epic scope, these characters of legend are still human and small, just as we all are.
I read this slowly to savor the individual pieces, but I could have just as easily torn through it like an experimental novel, despite the length.
Read it, share it, then come back and read it again. I plan to. I've already begun hunting down more of Narayanan's poetry, and I've started accumulating some of the source materials he drew from (I lucked upon a rare English-language copy of Magadh by Shrikant Verma, and it's beautiful). There is an entire world inside this book, and it will lead you to other worlds.
October 31, 2022
🖋 Don't get confused between this and the famous After Wattpad book series. This is a poetry book written by Vivek Narayanan.
🖋 This book by Vivek mostly contains poems inspired by Valmiki's Ramayana. It just doesn't have that. It also has many poems full of incalculable emotions, pain, and many other feelings from historical events.
🖋 The language of the poems, the writing, the design, and the pages vividly illustrated are just amazing work. Yes, in a few of the poems it would be hard to understand what was happening if you didn't read the info about the type of the poems. The places, the things, the people, everyone here has a poem of their own.
🖋 This is definitely not for a beginner. You should read a few poetry books before going to this one.
🖋 In a work that warrants comparison with Christopher Logue’s and Alice Oswald’s reshapings of Homer and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, the author Narayanan allows the ancient voice of the poem to engage with modern experience, initiating a transformative conversation across time.
🖋 The author has mostly used English in the book, but Sanskrit has also been used, but you wouldn't have a problem there as English of those words or lines is also written with them.
🖋 Overall, from the point of view of a poetry book, this was a great work. The research, the words, the author has filled the lines with great emotions.
🖋 This book by Vivek mostly contains poems inspired by Valmiki's Ramayana. It just doesn't have that. It also has many poems full of incalculable emotions, pain, and many other feelings from historical events.
🖋 The language of the poems, the writing, the design, and the pages vividly illustrated are just amazing work. Yes, in a few of the poems it would be hard to understand what was happening if you didn't read the info about the type of the poems. The places, the things, the people, everyone here has a poem of their own.
🖋 This is definitely not for a beginner. You should read a few poetry books before going to this one.
🖋 In a work that warrants comparison with Christopher Logue’s and Alice Oswald’s reshapings of Homer and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, the author Narayanan allows the ancient voice of the poem to engage with modern experience, initiating a transformative conversation across time.
🖋 The author has mostly used English in the book, but Sanskrit has also been used, but you wouldn't have a problem there as English of those words or lines is also written with them.
🖋 Overall, from the point of view of a poetry book, this was a great work. The research, the words, the author has filled the lines with great emotions.
October 22, 2025
While I admire the ambition placed into this work, the extensive research, the experimental styles, I just couldn’t enjoy it. The poems would occasionally have a vivid, gripping line, but more often they were just prose placed into disjointed lines. It’s frustrating when you can tell so much thought was placed into something and to have it feel in many ways thoughtless. My ignorance is probably on full display in this post, but I think it should be possible to appreciate the aesthetics of poems even without fully grasping the context.
February 16, 2025
This seems like a brilliant book, which I didn’t have the level of background knowledge needed to appreciate it. But if I began to dig more into either modern poetry, or the Ramayana, or possibly even modern Indian politics, I would come back to this again. I’d recommend it for someone knowledgeable or interested in any of those!
December 9, 2022
Towering work of art as poetry!
March 23, 2025
i would try to warn you about shiva but nothing could prepare you for that poem
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews