Review Of Tishani Doshi’s ‘egrets, while war’

I open Tishani Doshi's latest poetry collection ‘egrets, while war’ (HarperCollins India) on a long noon as sunlight spills through the leaves of nutmeg trees. The air is alive with the chatter of crow pheasants and treepies. Not far away, there’s a world pulsating with war, love and poetry. I am reminded of the morning broadcast of Rattle a couple of years ago in which Timothy Green had a conversation with Tishani Doshi. He signed off by saying “Tishani Doshi is my favourite poet”. Arguably, mine too.

Reading Doshi’s Forward Prize-nominated ‘egrets, while war’ is a natural continuation of my engagement with her earlier collections ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’ and ‘a god at the door’.

At ten, I’d turned into a peacock briefly,

but found I couldn’t commit. Most of us

domesticate eventually, learn to wield

the mop. I live in my own hermitage,

hardly pious, but …I learn to burn

my fetters, withhold flesh, Months of war

no dust settling, and I’m still me, tired

of trying to find the doorway to what’s wild

and pulsing…

Language is unfettered and alive, bright plumage of words refusing domestication. There’s a certain humour too, in coming to terms with the ways in which wildness is domesticated through every day rituals and the quiet compliance while choosing to preserve the inner conflicts.

Last night, after months away from home,

 a lapwing piercing the still dark still

with its warnings. Language, perhaps,

began like this. A campfire. One person

to keep watch who would have needed

something to sound danger….And once the words entered,

they were unstoppable, dragging dirt into the hallways

of our brains, pitching tents to watch sunsets over the greying

swamp. We had learned by then to make cleavers and picks,

tools to carve the scavenged flesh off bison and mammoths.

Language and violence proceeding together. It was only later,

that we could say things like, Go give the ass a drink

of wine to wash down the figs. Or, Will spend time preening

after copulation.

If poetry is a place of hidden surprises, one that delights as much as it causes anguish, Doshi’s poems inhabit both possibilities. They arrive with a flourish, pausing to draw the world into their gaze with all its musical brilliance and theatrical flamboyance.

In the garden, egrets are doing their stalking

dance, and it’s easy to see how they are really

feathered dinosaurs flown in through a hole

from the past…

The poems are conversational, yet carry within them a sharp fury.  Even within their unsettling premise, the ease in the voice belongs to someone deeply aware of the world around her and chooses to speak without softening the edges.

I’m trying to find where it says,

If your enemy comes to slay you at night

kill them in the morning. What happens

in the hours of waiting? Do you sing

to one another across the trenches,

stargaze from the casements, then set off

to duel at first light? What is it about the sun

rising that’s so self-righteous? The firstness,

the lightness? There’s an allegory somewhere

about a girl holding scissors encircled by soldiers

with guns. Don’t we know that the dragging

from trains take place after the dark, that wars

always happen offstage until they don’t?

The poems are prophecies of an apocalypse which is already underway while the world watches on with an astonishing indifference. In the elegies to species extinct and those on the brink of extinction, these poems are indictment of our collective apathy, of our choice to remain bystanders while the world burns.

Someone said, when children die, they become birds

In heaven. Someone wondered what punishment awaits

our white neighbours who have driven these wild pigeons

from our forests-the most beautiful flowers of creation.

Someone is always confusing children for birds, and birds

for flowers. Someone-a child-who is not a bird-child

or a flower-child but a child-child, said the war made us

feel like we’ve lived a hundred years.

Doshi’s poetry refuses to look away from the violence and disappearances that we have normalised in this century. Through the bird motifs and ruminations on war, the collection juxtaposes the tranquility of the natural world with destruction brought on by human interventions in the name of land, language and religion.  While there is an imminent political urgency in these poems, as a poet reading a poet it appears nearly impossible not to surrender at least a little to its music and beauty.

(Smitha Sehgal is a poet and legal professional)