A new collection of poetry explores emotions influenced by a post-pandemic world

Passenger pigeons find a place in Doshi’s poems. PIC COURTESY/WIKIMEDIA Commons

Poet and dancer Tishani Doshi's fifth collection of poems Egrets, While War (HarperCollins India) is a meditation on the world we live in. It bears witness to loss and reflects on the imagination and hope upon which we rest our will to survive. She tells us, "These poems are written coming out of the pandemic into a changed world of conflict, greater anxieties about climate change, and the sense of being on the edge of collapse, with the AI-tech nightmare." They ask us, what now, now that we have survived?

Tishani Doshi

Birds make several appearances in Doshi's poems. An oriole watches its terror-stricken mate while building a nest, twig by twig; extinct passenger pigeons make noise till their last breath; having known dread, egrets perform a stalking dance. "The appearance of the bird was gradual," Doshi tells us, having written about them in the past, too, and being a keen birdwatcher. "In this collection, they started to make thematic sense because at some point they were connecting between the poems and the themes."

The first birds were the ones Doshi observed in her garden: bulbuls, kingfisher, bee-eater and orioles. Apart from these, she says, "there was also a sense of the mythical or literary aspect of certain birds - the albatross from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the kraunchas from the Ramayana - and disappearances of birds like the passenger pigeon and the dodo. There was a fluttering, if you will, of the presence of these creatures that for me represent a liminal space between the terrestrial and where we are, earthbound and the skies, this time and past times," she adds.

In a poem from her earlier collection, dedicated to Telugu poet Varavara Rao, Doshi employs concrete poetry: poem in the shape of a bird. In this collection, the sonnet form takes predominance. The rain song of the Chatak and the liberated red-fez crest of woodpeckers in Doshi's work replace the longing for the elusive white-doe present in the earliest Petrarchan sonnets from the 13th century.

"I'm surprised by my engagement with the sonnet because I've tried in the past to write sonnets and it hasn't been a form that has worked for me." Assigned a modern sonnet chain with a group of poets, where each poet contributed a line to the sonnet, Doshi was propelled to pursue the form further. "Any form of constraint creates an interesting way to write poetry because it allows you a certain kind of freedom that formlessness doesn't," she shares.

Doshi's poems provide a sense of urgency of the now: All creatures standing at the precipice of a changing world. "Poetry is the most potent form of literature for me," she says, commenting on its "spell-making capability", and the "sonic reverence" that poets give to language that is "felt in the body". In other kinds of writing, she elaborates, one is "trained to rush at words and extract the meaning and what's useful to us immediately. Poetry subverts that. It forces you to change your relationship with space and time."

Tishani Doshi's Reading List

>> Proto by Laura Spinney
>> Bestiary by Julio Cortázar
>> Letter of Franz Kafka
>> Middlemarch by George Eliot