Egrets, While War

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.

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.

• 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 Sad18 Sonnet for the Dodo, Written Jet-lagged in Manchester as India and Pakistan Threaten War19 De-extinction Postcard 20 Living Through the Apocalypse21 A Stupa for the 49th Year of Life 22 Sonnet for the Two Birds in the Mundaka Upanishad23 Wasps at the Faucet24 Kill Them in the Morning25 Sonnet for the Mattamayūra, the Drunken Peacocks: a 10th CE Tantric School of Poets, Who Were Neither Drunkards Nor Peacocks26 The School of Drunken Peacocks27 Tamil Nadu Summer Aubade 28 Home Speaks in Many Tongues29 I See You. Do You See Me?32 Childhood as Studio Scene34 Sonnet for Martha, the Last Passenger Pigeon Who Died Aged 29 at the Cincinnati Zoo 35 Sonnet for George, Martha’s Last Surviving Cage Mate 36 Post-atrocity Statement38 The Albatross’s Sonnet to Western Civilisation as the Madleen Sets Sail for Gaza 39 Cutting My Father’s Toenails 40 Lizard Astrology 41 Sonnet for the Chātak: Steadfast Bird of Indic Love Poetry that Subsists Only on Raindrops 42 Love and Other Seasons45 Seeing a Tube of Vicco Vajradanti Toothpaste in My Friend’s Granny’s Bathroom in Trinidad46 Egrets, While War47 Conversations in the After 48 Are You Awake? 49 After the Anthropause50 Imperfect Sonnet for the Archaeopteryx51 Your Garden of Earthly Delights Is My Wunderkammer, or a Spell Uttered while Being Banished into the Badlands of Perimenopause53 My Sexbot Hal is a Mind Reader 55 January, Rescued by Rafa’s Thighs 57 Jeff Bezos Goes to Space and Becomes a Bhakti Poet59 Sonnet exchanged Between a Bird-Maiden and a Lost Sailor on the Island of Wāq-Wāq60 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 Cupid68 In Want of Wanting69 Perimenopausal Desire as Fruit-sucking Pink Underwing Moth70 I am the last poet of the village71 A Story Is a Stepwell Is an Underground River74 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 Taos77 Imagine Everyone in the World Going Through the Same Existential Angst at the Exact Same Date79 Time in Banaras82 The Heartbreak Hour of Late Afternoon83 The Brainfever Bird, Confused by Seasons84 Some Words to the Close and Holy Darkness87 Acknowledgements