Tishani Doshi

Egrets, While War is a lyric field guide to grief and resilience, where attention becomes a form of devotion, and intimacy, a quiet resistance.

The poems in Tishani Doshi’s fifth collection navigate the deep entanglements between environmental loss, ancestral memory, the slow transformations of ageing, and the devastations of war. Birds appear throughout these pages, not simply as subjects but as symbols and messengers, witnesses to war, extinction and exile. Mythic birds from the Ramayana fly alongside city pigeons and wild peacocks, forming a living archive of flight and disappearance. Here, love and desire emerge not as consolation, but as a form of radical presence – one of the last ways we remain tethered to the world. With lyric clarity and a gaze both wide and precise, Egrets, While War becomes a meditation on survival – of species, of history, of the heart.

'In Egrets, While War, grief and beauty share the same open palm – egrets lifting through smoke, mythic birds guiding ancestry through the present – and her incandescent poems insist that attention itself is a form of love. Even as war and extinction press close, Doshi keeps turning us toward astonishment, toward the tender fact of being alive together in a world that is breaking and still unbearably radiant.' – Aimee Nezhukumatathil

'Egrets, While War draws on everything from myth and family history to the metaverse, to create a word-weather, a landscape of individual imagery which we apprehend on our skin. An original and sensory exploration of beauty and loss in the environment and in the body.' – Imtiaz Dharker

'These terrific poems are a document of history, survival, and the recurring need for transcendence. Running through them is something obdurate and strong: an appetite for life, a "greed for the bloom". Politics is always with us, the poems tell us; so is the incongruous, inexhaustible delight of savouring.' – Amit Chaudhuri

'Beauty, body, and God positive, Tishani Doshi assembles in this road show of the mind that is part biennale, part takedown of banality, a sensorium of the now. As if to say even this, she transforms the absurd with divine vision. Think sexbots and plutocrats in space in the same held-breath as atrocity and extinction. Egrets, While War points us forward, a prayer map for exploring the borderless territories of catastrophe and rapture.' – Gregory Pardlo

'Be grateful for the poem with its fists raised, angry and tender and yearning all at once. Be grateful for the poem that lives in and against time, the poem that offers the past as a present, the poem in which an egret is a dinosaur dropping through a hole in the continuum to warn us. Be grateful for the poem that wants to be a bird, the poem that is a blood offering, the poem that is an amulet against death. Be grateful for the poet Tishani Doshi.' – Jeet Thayil

Tishani Doshi's previous collection, A God at the Door, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection:

'A God at the Door is angry yet playful, wide-reaching in its considerations, yet laser focussed in its detailing. The judges enjoyed its riches and its rebellion. moving between traditional verse forms and innovative new presentations, each executed with stunning technical fluidity. This remarkable collection is published by Bloodaxe.' – Forward Prize judges

'A God at the Door by Tishani Doshi is full of stand-out poems – dynamic, heartbreaking, full of colour and rage. I keep going back to it only to find even more depths, more colours, the whole world's in there!' – Pascale Petit, Poetry Society (Poetry Books of the Year 2023)

‘A generous mix of cosmic myth and earthy wit, Tishani Doshi’s fourth collection, A God at the Door, is wise and profound, with the lightest of touches…’ – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (Best poetry books of 2021)

‘A God at the Door brings mixed tidings: responses to harrowing recent events in Indian poet Tishani Doshi’s home country, but also strange disjunctions, offbeat humour, flashes of hope.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph (Christmas Poetry Books, 2021)

‘Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door was this year’s standout poetry collection for me. It’s a rich and fearless extravaganza of a book, outward-looking, engaging with global crises and news stories with passion and panache. These poems go far beyond reportage – each vignette is transformed into an expansive but compressed bomb. Dealing with subjects as wide-ranging as the shooting at a maternity clinic in Kabul, or the iconic photo of a tigress hugging a tree in Manchuria, the results are packed with fury, outrage, and humour. Sometimes the poem resembles the shape of its subject, so that the form on the page is like an exquisitely fired urn containing an explosion.’ – Pascale Petit, Ars Notoria (Poetry Books of the Year 2021)

‘Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door blew me away from the first poem… I found it original and utterly compelling.’ – John McCullough, Poetry News (Best poetry books of the year 2021)

'The poems of Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door operate on the grand scale, reaching for visionary responses to their often troubling subjects. They etch articulate outrage deftly on to ecological backdrops... everywhere these poems are caustic and comic in turn, “unbelted, unbuttoned”, shimmering and bright. Though “hope is a booby trap” in the war-ravaged landscapes, it is nevertheless offered up and renewed throughout this stunning and ambitious collection.' – Aingeal Clare, The Guardian

'This explosive book reads like a four-dimensional dance between the personal, the public, and the sacred, with the hidden fourth plane being the craft of poetry itself... Whether it's a god, genocide, Sumo wrestler, pair of Speedos, coronapocalypse, uterus, or hippopotamus, Doshi helps us enter the lives of others and connects us with our own.' – Kit Fan, The Poetry Review

‘Elegantly weaving together the intimate and the cosmic, it’s as overwhelming and disorientating as the year of ‘infectious’ panic and uncertain boundaries that it describes. It [‘Mandala’] is the opening poem in Doshi’s fine fourth collection A God at the Door.’ – Tristram Fane Saunders, Poem of the Week, The Telegraph

‘As its title suggests, Doshi’s fourth collection explores human and divine worlds with characteristic grace, style and wit... Doshi’s style is characterised by a tremendous fluidity and vitality. Her eloquent writing demonstrates an astonishing range of free verse suffused with both playfulness and fury… A powerful and timely collection from an accomplished poet who effortlessly traverses history, space and time to reflect on ‘the difficulty of reconciliation’ (‘Hope is the thing’) in these coronapocalyptic times.’ – Jennifer Lee Tsai, Mslexia, on A God at the Door

‘In A God at the Door, Tishani Doshi etches incisive, luminous portraits of humanity into landscapes where the grim and the comforting are frequently interchangeable…These poems delve into the conflicts between disaster and renewal and between past and present. They are tender enquiries rather than resolutions.’ – Nikita Biswal, Times Literary Supplement

'May we always have the music and elegant fury of Tishani Doshi’s poetry.' – Fatima Bhutto

Tishani Doshi reads from A God at the Door

Tishani Doshi reads and introduces five poems from A God at the Door: ‘Every Unbearable Thing’, ‘Listening to Abida Parveen on Loop I Understand Why I Miss Home and Why It Must Be So’, ‘Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers’, ‘Many Good & Wonderful Things’ and ‘Pilgrimage’. These poems can be read on this page: just click on the Extracts tab below to bring them up. She made this video at her home in Chennai, India, in April 2021, when A God at the Door was published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books.

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From the reviews of Tishani Doshi's Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods:

'This intelligent, elegant, unflinching collection. It’s very much a collection for this moment in history, but one that will endure long past it.' – Kamila Shamsie, The Guardian (Best Summer Reads)

'The title poem is a haunting vision of retribution… Doshi’s poem is exceptionally timely, although it was written before the rise of the #MeToo movement. It’s impossible not to cheer the boldness and liberation enacted by much of this book, and to be stirred by its bravery. To paraphrase one interviewer, Doshi is writing the anthems of her generation.’ – Sandeep Parmar, The Guardian

'The poet revels in a love of language; its capacity for ambiguity, for awe, to express emotional fragility. Sometimes playful and ambivalent, this is an invariably profound and excavating experience in its search for meaning.' - Linton Kwesi Johnson, Canon Mark Oakley and Clare Shaw, Judges of the Ted Hughes Award 2018

‘I love the opulent poetry of Tishani Doshi.’ – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times

Tishani Doshi reads Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods and other poems

Tishani Doshi reads and talks about ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’ and six other poems from the collection: ‘Everyone Loves a Dead Girl’, ‘Contract’. ‘Ode to Patrick Swayze’, ‘Find the Poets’, ‘A Fable for the 21st Century’ and ‘Poem for a Dead Dog’. Neil Astley filmed her reading poems from the book before her reading with Pascale Petit at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 5 July 2018.

Tishani Doshi dances Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods in Chennai

Tishani Doshi performs her dance version of ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’ at a TEDx event in Chennai in March 2018. The poem is read by her with music composed by Luca Nardon (www.lucanardon.it). She also read two other poems from Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods at this presentation, ‘Contract’ and ‘Find the Poets’ which you can view via this link.

Tishani Doshi dances Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods at the Dylan Thomas Birthplace

Tishani Doshi performs her dance version of ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’ in the Dylan Thomas Birthplace, Swansea, in July 2018. Filmed by Gareth M Davies (www.seebehindthemoon.com). Poem read by her with music composed by Luca Nardon (www.lucanardon.it).

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India: HarperCollins