Egrets, While War

‘Shall we not kneel instead? / Lean towards each growing thing / birdwing rhizome star’ Egrets, While War , award-winning writer Tishani Doshi’s fifth poetry collection, is alive with birds – woodpeckers and golden orioles, lapwings and ‘grey-hooded crows’, pigeons and egrets and the Ramayana’s kraunca. These are creatures that know not pristine lands, but terror-fields ravaged by famine and war. Amidst such wreckage, they become prayers and prophecies, omens and oracles, messengers of gods and winged-gods themselves, holding within their wildly beating hearts news of an afterlife – ‘Someone said, when children die, they become birds / in heaven.’ An extraordinary collection that navigates the deep entanglements between massacre, ageing and memory, Egrets, While War tells of a world where exile and extinction press close – ‘The dirge of loss recovery / loss loss loss continues’ – but it offers, too, against the odds, a possibility of coming out alive: bedazzled, birdlike and blue-throated. ‘Now scream,’ Tishani Doshi tells us, ‘now sing.’