After Pusan

After Pusan, first published in 1995, is the third panel (alongside

Blindfold Games and

Coastwise Lights, also in Faber Finds) of a triptych of memoirs by Alan Ross. Inspired by Ross's visit in 1986 to the South Korean coastal city of Pusan, like its predecessors it gracefully entwines poetry and prose. '

After Pusan opens with a thirty-page prose memoir of [Ross's] visit, economically and self-effacingly told, deft in its detail and tireless in its curiosity… This memoir is more than merely an adjunct to Ross's other travel writings, though, and more than only a prelude to the poems which fill the rest of these hundred pages.

After Pusan breaks a long silence in his life as a poet; and it was that visit to Korea… that suggested to him 'that if poetry was ever going to come again it might do so now.'

PN Review