Summer Requiem: A Book of Poems

Summer Requiem (2015) is Vikram Seth's first collection of new poems since All You Who Sleep Tonight. It opens with the long title poem, a free-verse meditation on loss, memory and loneliness. The shorter poems that follow return to rhyme and meter for lost love, aging and sleepless nights. They include translations of Giacomo Leopardi, a sequence of haiku and four poems written to be set to music for a music society in Dorset.

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Fareed Zakaria: “And Vikram Seth, whose most astonishing work is a novel in verse, “The Golden Gate,” written in iambic tetrameter and modeled on Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin.” As you read it, you are charmed by the story while still aware and in awe of Seth’s talent.”