Egrets, While War is a lyric field guide to grief and resilience, where attention becomes a form of devotion, and intimacy, a quiet resistance.
The poems in Tishani Doshis fifth collection navigate the deep entanglements between environmental loss, ancestral memory, the slow transformations of ageing, and the devastations of war. Birds appear throughout these pages, not simply as subjects but as symbols and messengers, witnesses to war, extinction and exile. Mythic birds from the Ramayana fly alongside city pigeons and wild peacocks, forming a living archive of flight and disappearance. Here, love and desire emerge not as consolation, but as a form of radical presence one of the last ways we remain tethered to the world. With lyric clarity and a gaze both wide and precise, Egrets, While War becomes a meditation on survival of species, of history, of the heart.
Tishani Doshi's previous collection, A God at the Door, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Arvustused
These terrific poems are a document of history, survival, and the recurring need for transcendence. Running through them is something obdurate and strong: an appetite for life, a 'greed for the bloom' Politics is always with us, the poems tell us; so is the incongruous, inexhaustible delight of savouring. -- Amit Chaudhuri Be grateful for the poem with its fists raised, angry and tender and yearning all at once. Be grateful for the poem that lives in and against time, the poem that offers the past as a present, the poem in which an egret is a dinosaur dropping through a hole in the continuum to warn us. Be grateful for the poem that wants to be a bird, the poem that is a blood offering, the poem that is an amulet against death. Be grateful for the poet Tishani Doshi. -- Jeet Thayil This explosive book reads like a four-dimensional dance between the personal, the public, and the sacred, with the hidden fourth plane being the craft of poetry itself... Whether it's a god, genocide, Sumo wrestler, pair of Speedos, coronapocalypse, uterus, or hippopotamus, Doshi helps us enter the lives of others and connects us with our own. -- Kit Fan * The Poetry Review * Egrets, While War draws on everything from myth and family history to the metaverse, to create a word-weather, a landscape of individual imagery which we apprehend on our skin. An original and sensory exploration of beauty and loss in the environment and in the body. -- Imtiaz Dharker In Egrets, While War, grief and beauty share the same open palm egrets lifting through smoke, mythic birds guiding ancestry through the present and her incandescent poems insist that attention itself is a form of love. Even as war and extinction press close, Doshi keeps turning us toward astonishment, toward the tender fact of being alive together in a world that is breaking and still unbearably radiant. -- Aimee Nezhukumatathil A God at the Door is angry yet playful, wide-reaching in its considerations, yet laser focussed in its detailing. The judges enjoyed its riches and its rebellion. moving between traditional verse forms and innovative new presentations, each executed with stunning technical fluidity. This remarkable collection is published by Bloodaxe. * Forward Prize judges * The poems of Tishani Doshis A God at the Door operate on the grand scale, reaching for visionary responses to their often troubling subjects. They etch articulate outrage deftly on to ecological backdrops... everywhere these poems are caustic and comic in turn, unbelted, unbuttoned, shimmering and bright. Though hope is a booby trap in the war-ravaged landscapes, it is nevertheless offered up and renewed throughout this stunning and ambitious collection. -- Aingeal Clare * The Guardian *
13 Amor Mundi
14 A Theory on the Origin of Language
15 Poem for a Stranger in a Time of War
17 Coming to Terms with the Metaverse, which Is Making Me Feel Old and Sad
18 Sonnet for the Dodo, Written Jet-lagged in Manchester as India and
Pakistan Threaten War
19 De-extinction Postcard
20 Living Through the Apocalypse
21 A Stupa for the 49th Year of Life
22 Sonnet for the Two Birds in the Mundaka Upanishad
23 Wasps at the Faucet
24 Kill Them in the Morning
25 Sonnet for the Mattamayra, the Drunken Peacocks: a 10th CE Tantric School
of Poets, Who Were Neither Drunkards Nor Peacocks
26 The School of Drunken Peacocks
27 Tamil Nadu Summer Aubade
28 Home Speaks in Many Tongues
29 I See You. Do You See Me?
32 Childhood as Studio Scene
34 Sonnet for Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon Who Died Aged 29 at the
Cincinnati Zoo
35 Sonnet for George, Marthas Last Surviving Cage Mate
36 Post-atrocity Statement
38 The Albatrosss Sonnet to Western Civilisation as the Madleen Sets Sail
for Gaza
39 Cutting My Fathers Toenails
40 Lizard Astrology
41 Sonnet for the Chtak: Steadfast Bird of Indic Love Poetry that Subsists
Only on Raindrops
42 Love and Other Seasons
45 Seeing a Tube of Vicco Vajradanti Toothpaste in My Friends Grannys
Bathroom in Trinidad
46 Egrets, While War
47 Conversations in the After
48 Are You Awake?
49 After the Anthropause
50 Imperfect Sonnet for the Archaeopteryx
51 Your Garden of Earthly Delights Is My Wunderkammer, or a Spell Uttered
while Being Banished into the Badlands of Perimenopause
53 My Sexbot Hal is a Mind Reader
55 January, Rescued by Rafas Thighs
57 Jeff Bezos Goes to Space and Becomes a Bhakti Poet
59 Sonnet exchanged Between a Bird-Maiden and a Lost Sailor on the Island of
Wq-Wq
60 My Welsh Grandfather Meets My Indian Grandfather on an Unspecified
Mountaintop
64 Sonnet for the Two Birds that Kick off the Ramayana
65 Seven Poems for Kamadeva, who is not the Indian Cupid
68 In Want of Wanting
69 Perimenopausal Desire as Fruit-sucking Pink Underwing Moth
70 I am the last poet of the village
71 A Story Is a Stepwell Is an Underground River
74 What Happened Next We Do Not Know
76 Sonnet for My Sister and the Eagle Who Tried to Steal the Bobble off Her
Hat in Taos
77 Imagine Everyone in the World Going Through the Same Existential Angst at
the Exact Same Date
79 Time in Banaras
82 The Heartbreak Hour of Late Afternoon
83 The Brainfever Bird, Confused by Seasons
84 Some Words to the Close and Holy Darkness
87 Acknowledgements
Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. She was born in Madras, India, in 1975. She received her masters in writing from the Johns Hopkins University in America and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001 to work with the choreographer Chandralekha, with whom she performed on many international stages. An avid traveller, she has been trekking in the Ethiopian Bale Mountains, visited Antarctica with a group of high-school students, and documented the largest transgender gathering in Koovakam. She has written about her travels in newspapers such as The Guardian, International Herald Tribune, The Hindu and the Financial Times. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 2001. In 2006, she won the All-India Poetry Competition, and her debut collection, Countries of the Body (Aark Arts), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers (Bloomsbury, 2010), was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Award, and has been translated into several languages. Her second poetry collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2012. Fountainville: new stories from the Mabinogion was published by Seren in 2013. Her third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018 in the UK, and for the poetry category of the 2019 Firecracker Awards in the US. Her second novel, Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury, 2019), was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her fourth poetry collection, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her fifth, Egrets, While War, is published by Bloodaxe in 2026. Tishani Doshi lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and dogs. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
