Egrets, While War reflects on aging, mortality, and survival in a world where violence and the beauty of nature coexist.
Unflinching, yet tender, the poems in Tishani Doshi’s Egrets, While War exist in a world of dualities, holding “desire in one hand, suffering in another.” Meditations on loss and larger world conflicts move alongside personal experiences, vulnerable self-reflections, and a deep longing for “what’s wild / and pulsing.” Thick with lush and immersive imagery, the pages of this collection are punctuated by birds as omens, as prophecies, as epiphanies, and sometimes, as moments of “brief blazing splendor.” Parakeets feed from orange blossoms outside a window. Wildflowers appear in the garden overnight. Sunbirds dive “in and out / of dens of gold.” Sharp and subtle, these poems lament the loss of humanity, while relishing the beauty, strength, and persistence of the natural world. Egrets, While War posits hope, resilience, and the earth as answers to our physical, spiritual, and emotional survival.
ISBN: 9781556597350
Format: Paperback
Reviews
“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
“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
“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
“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