Universal Beach

Poetry. South Asia Studies. "Vivek Narayanan's poems remind me of a thriving port city, where diverse tongues are spoken, their registers varying from a priestly classical to a piratical demotic. Narayanan founds his poetic universe on a sophisticated understanding of bricolage: with a keen eye on the uses of friction, he counterpoints the certainties of definitions with the deceptions of synaesthesia; he sends up the vagueness of academic discourse with devastatingly precise onomatopoeia, and segues adroitly from memoir to surveillance report, from the elegiac to the carnivalesque. And then there are moments of luminosity, when the word becomes the bearer of hope and redemption. Not by offering us a spurious clarity, but challenging us into insight with a jaggedness of phrase, a treacherously ambiguous grammar, and a demanding musicality"��anjit Hoskote.