If poetry is a place of hidden surprises, one that delights as much as it causes anguish, Tishani Doshi’s poems inhabit both possibilities.
Language is unfettered and alive in this collection, bright plumage of words refusing domestication.
Doshi’s poetry refuses to look away from the violence and disappearances that we have normalised in this century.
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)
