Universal Beach (Bombay: Harbour Line, 2006)
Click on the link above to read / download a complete copyright-free pdf of the Indian edition of Universal
Beach, my first book of poems. (It’s on a creative commons attribution license, which
means that you’re free to use, reproduce, remix all or part of this book–tho I
ask that you attribute and let me know!) Also included here at the beginning are some of the photos that Shumona Goel took for the cover.
Original Blurbs for Universal Beach by Ranjit Hoskote and David Herd:
‘Soon the world will know of a daring, vigorous, sexy, humane, wise and traveled poet. It will find in Universal Beach a remarkable formal control, and an equally remarkable free-verse nonchalance. Narayanan has a noise all his own; a voice, happily exceeding the limitations of voice.
- David Herd
‘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 definition 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 by challenging us into insight with a jaggedness of phrase, a treacherously ambiguous grammar, and a demanding musicality. ’
- Ranjit Hoskote