Universal Beach

American readers now treasure the Indian novel, but the subcontinent's poets have been slower to cross the seas; Narayanan's eclectic, exceptionally intelligent, sometimes stellar debut should change that. Raised partly in Africa, well-traveled in the U.S., Narayanan now writes and edits verse and prose from Delhi. His settings, and attitudes, speak to all three continents. Sometimes he sets clear scenes and tells elegant tales%E2%80%94the South Indian film star Silk Smitha (later dead by her own hand) is "the slut/ among white hippies on the beach,/ around the campfire, hot pants/ and an upright ponytail/ for style." Speedy sonnets address the contemporary city through its omnipresent and unpleasant elements, from car horns to cement. Narayanan presents himself as indelibly Indian, but also as a citizen of a digital, global Anglophone milieu: "I want to be sweet and clear and free, as half a line/ of Auden, or an episode of the Powerpuff Girls." Elsewhere his language gets denser (at times, too much so): Americans may find parallels from Terrance Hayes to Geoffrey Hill. Narayanan addresses one fine and emblematic long poem to the great Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa on a return visit to South Africa. For all the shape-shifting and code-switching, though, Narayanan ends up his own man, energetic, youthful, unillusioned, and international. (Aug.)