Birds, Grief and Disbelief: Tishani Doshi on Her New Poetry Collection

Tishani Doshi’s fifth poetry collection, Egrets, While War, published by HarperCollins, weaves together birds, ancestral memory, and the weight of contemporary crises. In a conversation from Paramankeni, a coastal village near Chennai where she lives, the award-winning poet, writer and dancer spoke about the themes that animate her latest work.

Birds have long appeared in Doshi’s poems, but in this collection they play a more active role. “It’s not just that birds happen to fly into the poem, but they’re actually quite active in the making of the poem,” she said. The collection features a range of winged creatures, from “emerald-bodied” parakeets to the last passenger pigeon, Martha, who died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo, and even the archaeopteryx, a fossilised transitional species between reptiles and birds.

For Doshi, birds offer a counterpoint to the darkness of the times. “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.”

The poems are rooted in grief in its many forms — solastalgia, Weltschmerz, and anticipatory loss. Reflecting on the last three years, Doshi said, “We have been witnessing remarkably exaggerated things — conflicts, genocide, climate change, politics of real horror.” She described the poems as emerging from a sense of disbelief: “that, of all the directions we could have taken, this is where we are.”

Time is another central concern. The collection intertwines the prehistoric past with the present, and cycles of death and destruction. Doshi explained that this has to do with being at a “mid-path” in life — neither young nor old. “The past is childhood and ancestry and the beginnings of where you came from, and the future is unknowable, but you are trying to move towards it with a particular intention.”

She noted a longing to know about the people who preceded her in her family. “There is also the planet’s time, the big, universe time that makes human life completely inconsequential.” Within that vast scale, she continues to explore belonging — a question she has addressed across her work. In this book, she said, “there is a lot of turning back, saying that while I might be moving into this next stage of life, I want to bring that childhood and those ancestors with me.”

The ageing body also features prominently. Given the physical demands of her work as a writer and dancer, Doshi is acutely aware of bodily change. She contrasted this with the ambitions of those who seek to transcend mortality: “While the tech bros are trying to live forever, we know from all the myths the hubris of this kind.”

Egrets, While War continues Doshi’s exploration of the human condition amidst planetary and personal histories. Her poems hold space for both enormous grief and the ordinary moments of the present, seeking lightness even as the world darkens.