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.

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

About the Author

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. She was born in Madras, India, in 1975. She received her masters in writing from the Johns Hopkins University in America and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001 to work with the choreographer Chandralekha, with whom she performed on many international stages. An avid traveller, she has been trekking in the Ethiopian Bale Mountains, visited Antarctica with a group of high-school students, and documented the largest transgender gathering in Koovakam. She has written about her travels in newspapers such as The Guardian, International Herald Tribune, The Hindu and the Financial Times. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 2001. In 2006, she won the All-India Poetry Competition, and her debut collection, Countries of the Body (Aark Arts), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers (Bloomsbury, 2010), was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Hindu Fiction Award, and has been translated into several languages. Her second poetry collection, Everything Begins Elsewhere, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2012. Fountainville: new stories from the Mabinogion was published by Seren in 2013. Her third collection, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2018 in the UK, and for the poetry category of the 2019 Firecracker Awards in the US. Her second novel, Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury, 2019), was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her fourth poetry collection, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her fifth, Egrets, While War, is published by Bloodaxe in 2026. Tishani Doshi lives on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and dogs. She is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

Reviews

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

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

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 *

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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781780377896
Author Tishani Doshi
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 8mm