Egrets, While War by Tishani Doshi

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Shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2026 Egrets, While War is a lyric field guide to grief and resilience, where attention becomes a form of devotion, and intimac y, 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 '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 Show more