‘Egrets, While War’: Poet Tishani Doshi’s most existential and reflective work yet

Reading Egrets, While War in my flat abroad while police brutality ravaged protests in Delhi, the city I called home as an adult, I grew certain of one thing: Tishani Doshi’s poetry has never been this urgent.

The poems in this volume place everyday objects alongside images of brutality, starvation, and war to emphasise the absurdity of continuing one’s mundane life as the world falls apart. Birds, thematically, are the emotional centre of these poems: carrying messages of hope amongst rubble, holding parallel versions of the self, and raising questions of extinction and impermanence.

In the opening poem of the book, “Amor Mundi”, the speaker meets a lover in a “winged lonely century” and their connection makes the speaker understand “the fallacy of a wall” – setting forth the bleakness from which these poems are birthed, and the importance of togetherness.

Like in many of Doshi’s poems, “Amor Mundi” ends with an image of life, not death: of “emerald-bodied luminaries” or parakeets on the tree outside. Similarly, in “The Albatross’s Sonnet to Western Civilization as the Madleen Sets Sail for Gaza”, Doshi engages with the mythology of the albatross, asking

“What can one boat do for the besieged?
What can one bird do, except show up in a poem or two,
hang around...

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