Some poetry collections demand to be read. Others demand to be lived with. Tishani Doshi’s Egrets, While War belongs firmly in the latter category. Her fifth collection is not merely about war or birds or loss—it is about what remains human when the world appears to be falling apart.
Doshi has long occupied a unique space in contemporary Indian writing, where the lyrical effortlessly meets the political. In Egrets, While War, she pushes that conversation further, asking difficult questions about violence, displacement, climate anxiety, ageing and memory without ever sounding preachy. Instead, she lets images do the work. Birds fly through these poems not as decorative metaphors but as survivors, messengers and silent witnesses to history.
The collection opens with an invitation that quietly sets its emotional compass:
“Shall we not kneel instead?
Lean towards each growing thing
birdwing rhizome star.”
It is a plea for attention in an age that has forgotten how to look.
One of the most striking poems, “Living Through the Apocalypse,” captures the absurdity of modern existence with unsettling precision. The poet writes of a world where brutality is repackaged as beauty and violence is normalised until even truth becomes difficult to recognise:
“They will have us believe
we are waking to a garden…
that the red hole in the dead man’s chest
is a rare kind of flower.”
Few contemporary poets can compress political commentary into such deceptively simple language. The poem never names a country or a conflict, making it painfully universal.
Yet Egrets, While War is not overwhelmed by despair. Doshi repeatedly returns to the possibility of tenderness, even in devastation. In “De-extinction Postcard,” she imagines a world erased by catastrophe but refuses to surrender its ordinary beauty:
“If you have known love, understand:
The view to infinity is marred by hedgerow,
a line of bedclothes drying.”
It is this juxtaposition—the cosmic and the domestic—that gives the collection its emotional force. Apocalypse exists alongside banana trees, dogs, flowers and laundry drying in the sun.
Doshi also writes with remarkable honesty about ageing and mortality. In “A Stupa for the 49th Year of Life,” she meditates on death not as an abstract philosophical idea but as something intimately woven into everyday life. Even while acknowledging emptiness, she arrives at an affirmation that feels quietly triumphant:
“Living so long, and still greedy for the bloom.”
Perhaps the greatest achievement of this collection is that it never loses faith in wonder. Birds recur throughout—not as symbols of escape but as reminders that life persists despite everything. Whether egrets rising through smoke, sparrows after a storm or wasps returning again and again to water, nature becomes a language of resilience.
The poems are richly layered with mythology, Buddhist philosophy, the Mundaka Upanishad, family history and ecological concerns, yet they remain emotionally accessible. Readers need not understand every reference to feel their impact. Doshi trusts imagery more than explanation, and that trust rewards careful reading.
The publisher describes the collection as one that holds “terror and promise, despair and hope” together. That is an accurate assessment. But what ultimately lingers is neither terror nor hope alone—it is attention. Attention to birds, to memory, to broken landscapes, to the body and to the fragile miracle of continuing to live.
In an era saturated with instant reactions and fleeting headlines, Egrets, While War slows the reader down. It asks us to witness before we judge, to mourn before we move on, and to notice beauty without forgetting suffering.
This is not easy poetry, nor is it meant to be. It is poetry that unsettles, consoles and returns to the reader long after the final page. Like the egrets that glide through these poems, Tishani Doshi’s words hover in the mind—quiet, luminous and impossible to ignore.
