Interview | Tishani Doshi’s poems of disbelief in her new book, ‘Egrets, While War’

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The Chennai-based poet is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. | Photo Credit: Carlo Pizzati

Birds flit in and out of Tishani Doshi’s fifth poetry collection, Egrets, While War : “emerald-bodied” parakeets; “soft and earthbound” dodos; “limitless feathery blue” peacocks; Martha, the very last passenger pigeon in the world who died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo, aged 29; egrets, those “feathered dinosaurs”, even an archaeopteryx, believed to be a transitional species between reptiles and birds, fossilised in a shallow lagoon.

While these winged creatures have been in her poems for a long time, in this collection (published by HarperCollins), they are present in a different way, says the award-winning poet, writer and dancer over a Zoom call from Paramankeni, the coastal village near Chennai where she lives. “It’s not just that birds happen to fly into the poem, but they’re actually quite active in the making of the poem.” And, as anybody who reads about birds will know, there are millions of things that are just amazing about them, believes Doshi. “Just seeing its flash of colour is a joyous thing, and when you are faced with images of such horror, having this image of lightness or colour, even if for a brief moment, is uplifting.” Edited extracts from the conversation:

Grief, in its different forms, whether solastalgia, Weltschmerz or anticipatory loss, lies at the core of this anthology, which draws deeply from what is happening in the world right now. Could you tell us more?

The last three years have been one thing after the other. You would imagine that after a pandemic, there might be this move towards renewal of things, like wonder, awe and what it means to be alive, because we were so close to annihilation. But we’ve gone in the other direction, and I feel, like many people, a sense of helplessness, anger and confusion about how we got here.

It feels hyperbolic to talk in this way, but we have been witnessing remarkably exaggerated things — conflicts, genocide, climate change, politics of real horror. So, I think the poems come simply from a sort of disbelief that, of all the directions we could have taken, this is where we are.

Essentially, that is the feeling of it… very much a sense of how to hold this enormous grief and threat of endtimes, while also picking through the ordinary day, the human present.

Something that really struck me was how time works in this anthology: the prehistoric past intertwined with the present, the cyclicity of death and destruction, the body being an archive of lived experiences as well as ancestry…

It has to do with being at a particular stage in my own life, this feeling of having arrived at a kind of mid-path where you are neither young nor old, but looking, with your face, to both directions.