Media contributions
1Media contributions
Title Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year 2022 Degree of recognition International Media name/outlet Times Literary Supplement Country/Territory United Kingdom Date 18/11/22 Description In the centenary year of The Waste Land and Ulysses, the book that has absorbed and excited me most is one that extends the tradition of projecting epic into the cinema of modernity. Vivek Narayanan’s After (NYRB Poets), the inspired labour of a decade, derives more than 500 pages of new poems in English from the Sanskrit of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Working a free verse line as fine and tight as wire, Narayanan taps narrative for lyric electricity, all the while keeping the scaffolding of the story cycle – and the city of scholarship that surrounds it – in view with his generous notes. If I could nominate a critic to give a long-read account of any poet now writing, it would be Vidyan Ravinthiran, whose Worlds Woven Together: Essays on poetry and poetics (Columbia) ranges from Rae Armantrout to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra for some of the best close readings around: incisive, reflective, illuminating. Persons Jeremy Noel-Tod