Birdsong in the Shadows
A conversation between Michael Symmons Roberts and Tishani Doshi
Michael Symmons Roberts, Tishani Doshi
Michael Symmons Roberts: Tishani, your new collection Egrets, While War is wonderful and full of birds! When Isabelle suggested we might start our conversation with birds as a common thread between our books, I was surprised, as I didn’t think Dog Star had many birds in it. Then I looked back, and it’s full of them. The birds must have crept into the poems whilst my attention was elsewhere. So maybe we could start our conversation with ‘attention’ and birds. It’s there in your title (and title poem) – Egrets, While War – which I read as a meditation on attention. Is that right?
Tishani Doshi: That’s the thing about birds, in my experience at least – they’ve been peripheral for most of my life, but over the past ten years they have really taken centre stage and made their way into pretty much every poem in the book. Obviously, they offer all kinds of metaphorical vehicles, but I think one of the most startling aspects is how directly they link us to time. This experience of watching the cattle egrets in my garden one January morning, observing their stalking dance and realising how prehistoric that movement is, which then escalates into all kinds of ideas about evolution and sediments, what’s buried under the earth, the fragments of bone and fossil. And I live by the ocean, the Bay of Bengal; I hear it all the time. So, just beyond my garden, is this big soup of creation from which all life emerged. The birds are mediators between all these worlds, and, I guess, poem-like; there’s this capacity in birds to hold a lyric presentness but also rise out of time entirely.
I love that you too have a bird app on your phone! Is it the poet’s need to name, to codify, to recognise song? I found them everywhere in Dog Star – and I wanted to ask you about the bullfinches in your poem ‘Salitter’. Such a beautiful poem. I had to go seek out the meaning of the word: divine essence, heavenly soil! I hope it’s not too quick to leap into the BIG ideas. But really: hope, astonishment, divinity, which are also very wing-like in how they can be experienced. I know you’ve written about this in Quartet for the End of Time, but could you say something about this element of birds as messengers/harbingers in your own work? Another phrase that came up in both books, which I was unfamiliar with, and which I just loved, was ‘desire path’. What a gorgeous name. This notion of a path – direct but messy, illicit, needing to be made and remade.
So much of my poetic obsessions have to do with a mediation between innerness and outerness. And your original question of attention, you know, for me also springs from a kind of desire, almost devotional in a most secular way, but everything surely begins with desire, which is a kind of attention, and from attention a kind of awareness. Everything that has to do with the realm of the imagination, the visionary, relies upon how we move between the visible and the invisible – and I suppose speech, or song, or a desire path, or an egret, could bridge that gap?
MSR: That’s a wonderful description of the way poems emerge – those January egrets in your garden opening a door to evolution and sediments and the ‘big soup of creation’. Birds for me, as for you, have been peripheral until recent years, their songs just part of the soundtrack to the urgency of daily life. But it was through thinking and writing about Olivier Messiaen’s music (mainly his Quartet for the End of Time) that I began to listen properly to birdsong and to ‘see’ the birds. Messiaen believed that birds had somehow escaped the Fall, so their music is the sound of Eden, the music of paradise. That’s why he incorporated so much of it into his own work. When you say that birds can ‘rise out of time entirely’, you are in that same mystical territory.
There’s a poem called ‘Eurasian Blackbird’ in Dog Star, which comes from my recent obsession with that garden bird in particular. I live between Manchester and the Peak District, and the blackbird seems entirely at home in city squares or Peak Copse, with a voice that goes back to prehistoric wildwoods.
I love your suggestion that attention begins with (and is a kind of) desire. The term ‘desire paths’ – tracks not consciously designed or planned but worn into the landscape by people or animals on their way from place to place – has always intrigued me, not least because it speaks to the exploratory work of making poems, and why we keep on doing it.
There are rich questions in your opening paragraph, and I’d love to pick up later on the point you make about a poet’s need ‘to name, to codify, to recognise song’, which for me includes a response to grief. But first, I wanted to pick up on your thread about harbingers in poems, about big ideas and the attempt to move between the visible and invisible. Do you feel there’s a risk for poets in pushing into that territory (no single word quite nails it, but words like ‘metaphysical’ or ‘spiritual’ offer pointers)? And if so, what kind of risk? Of sounding too portentous, grandiose? Of suggesting you have answers when they feel more like questions? There’s a temptation to leaven or undercut it with wit, but that can seem self-defensive and undermine the poem. I think your closing poem in this collection – ‘Some Words to the Close and Holy Darkness’ (a wonderful title!) – walks that difficult line beautifully, feet on the ground and eyes on the firmament, and the dove and crows connecting both worlds. Could you talk about the making of that poem? And are you conscious, in writing about what you call ‘BIG ideas’, where that will take you, and how you’re going to get there?
TD: I think everything about being a poet is risky, no? The risk of being ridiculous, or overly vulnerable, or obscure. The entire enterprise of calling yourself a poet seems to me about embracing uncertainty and being able to live with a certain level of fear. In terms of venturing into the area of what we might term metaphysical, I think the main risk for me is earnestness, which I always want to keep at bay. And so, you’re right, one reflex is to be a bit jokey, to divert the reader before hitting them – surprise! – with a metaphysical smack, which can undermine the poem as you rightly say. I think mainly for me, it’s about acknowledging my outsider status within this metaphysical terrain. As someone who grew up in India, where so many faiths are practiced in surround sound and on fully display, I’ve grown up witnessing other people’s faith and realising I don’t have it. The whole last collection A God at the Door was about this: I’m never going to be the devotee who’s occupying the inner chamber; I’m peeking through at the threshold, that’s my position. So, that notion is important, a kind of hinge in the landscape.
The other thing is, what do we consider holy, even those of us outside the inner chamber? Which is why I love that line from Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales,’I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept’, which forms the title of my poem ‘Some Words to the Close and Holy Darkness’. I love that for Thomas the dark is holy. I find the binary presentation of light and dark to be very perplexing. How revelation and epiphany are frequently framed through light. I was writing an essay about truth and was really interested in how Plato’s cave-dwellers believed the shadows were their reality, and he led them out to the true forms of things that lay outside the cave in the light. In Indic thought though, the direction of enlightenment is reversed. Mystics went into caves in order to meditate, to shed their attachments and to understand the true nature of reality. So, one is a travelling out into the light, and the other is a travelling into the dark.
One of my favourite books is Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, where he suggests that the murk is where things are really happening. In ‘Eurasian Blackbird’, you begin with a paean: ‘You dark of plumage, / darker still of voice, / denizen of deepest wildwoods’. I love this leaning into darkness, and that alliteration, how the poem moves into the ripe full stop of the bird’s eye, which seems to hold the whole world. It seems to me that the dark in your poems seems more alive? It grows crystals, has the capacity to really make you see … and the daylight comes in fragments, is unstable?
I want to also come back to grief. You know, the Sanskrit word for death and time and the dark is the same: ‘Kala’. And this spins my head around thinking about it. I write about it in ‘Time in Banaras’, which also features my father and I guess an anticipatory grief? You have a poem about your father’s death (it is your father’s death, isn’t it?), ‘Taxonomy’, which begins in the small hours with the speaker counting which houses have their lights on. It’s this wonderful list poem, which also feels very threshold-like, and in the next poem you have this beautiful line: ‘What is it holding there, / some ante-light before the full light comes?’ (‘Gentian Liqueur’). ‘[A]nte-light’ is such a gorgeous description – this waiting chamber, or maybe it’s as waiting cave, to prime you before you can see – which brings me back to the whole movement between the visible/invisible and all this scrabbling about we poets do. Could you talk a bit about how you negotiate these ideas of light and dark in your own work? I’d also love to hear about what feels particularly risky for you in a poem.
MSR: That’s an astonishing poem of yours, ‘Time in Banaras’, which you open with, ‘Let there be dark, really, let / there be this immensity’. I love the ‘really’ which underlines and undermines the opening statement in a single word, and it’s one of many poems in Egrets, While War that explores death and time. I was very taken with your poem ‘Cutting My Father’s Toenails’ too. We’re both writing poems of anticipatory and realised grief, and you’re right to read the adjacent poems in Dog Star ‘Taxonomy’ and ‘Gentian Liqueur’ as kinds of elegy, the former about my mother and the latter about my father.
The counting or reckoning up in taxonomy is a function of grief, as I discovered when I was with my mother on her last night in hospital. I was unconsciously counting the ceiling tiles, the numbers of slats on the blind in the window; I had a sort of deep instinct to try to impose order or structure onto a situation where I had no agency, where there was literally nothing I could do. I had just seen a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and was a bit nonplussed by the ending when, after their lives have fallen apart, Vanya and Sonya sit down and start doing the accounts. It only made sense to me after that final night with my mother. So there is grief in the book, but I hope there’s a stronger thread of life in it.
I am also fascinated by In Praise of Shadows and wrote about it in Quartet for the End of Time. Like you, I find myself drawn into the imagery of darkness, and like you I find the binary presentation of light and dark to be perplexing and untruthful. The blackbird poem is, as you suggest, a leaning into that bird’s darkness of plumage and voice as the source of its life, its majesty. I’ve become a bit obsessed by blackbirds since writing about the composer Olivier Messiaen; he held them, and their song, as something miraculous and sacred.
You’re going to think I’m making this up, but as I wrote that last sentence, a blackbird broke into song in the tree outside my window, on a cold, rainy February night after dark in north-west England. That’s the first blackbird I’ve seen or heard here since last autumn.
We’ve both got Welsh ancestry and I wondered if you like the poems of the seventeenth-century Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan? These lines from his poem ‘The Night’ blew me away when I first came across them in an anthology: ‘There is in God, some say, / A deep but dazzling darkness’. Like your poems in A God at the Door, I often feel my poems are drawn to the threshold of – for want of a better word – that metaphysical terrain. I lost faith in atheism in my twenties, and since then that threshold between belief and doubt, presence and absence, seems to be where the poems want to go. Presence/absence, like light and darkness, is another binary worth challenging, don’t you think? I’m struck by those ancient biblical poems the Psalms, which are full of God’s absence, but to name and frame that absence in a poem is to make it present.
I’m very interested to ask you about how you write as well as what you write, not least because your books have such a complex tracery in them, the way the poems speak to each other, elucidate and complicate each other. At what stage do you know the shape and territory of a new collection as you are working on it?
TD: So much to contemplate here, Michael, not least the notion of voice as source of life. What a magical moment, to hear the first blackbird of the year. Aside from the sense of song, of announcement, there’s also the insistence of here I am. Something of poetic territory as well, the insistence of the voice regardless.
I don’t know the work of Henry Vaughan, but I shall seek it out. How striking, that line about ‘a deep but dazzling darkness’ in God followed by ‘O for that night! where I in Him / Might live invisible and dim!’ It goes back to that space of shadows, the murk, the dimming, or the ‘eigengrau’, as you put it in your poem ‘Greys.’ The in-betweenness of things.
In terms of process – it’s all still mysterious to me. The notion of a poem. A Beginning. It is very difficult for me to think of a book as an entity unless I’ve written most of it. It’s as though I can only arrive at what I’m trying to do by actually writing it. I think probably the most potent thing for me is image. If there are starting points, it is usually in an image that is somehow seared into the consciousness, and that returns and demands to be addressed in some way. Sometimes I wonder whether the image was real, or dream, and of course when you write it scarcely matters – just that the image is the thing from which the poem begins.
I remember interviewing the writer and editor Roberto Calasso some years ago and asking him what role the image might have in these times where the image is everywhere. In Calasso’s book La Folie Baudelaire he writes about ‘the greediness of the eye’; how for Baudelaire, the image was a potent stimulus, and how thought didn’t simply move through words, but through images, through non-linguistic modes. And he said, living through the age of bulimia of the eye (and we were speaking way before the whole AI-generated mania), the overflow of digital images could lead to a kind of deadening, which could somehow knock us out of our connection with the world of myths. I think about that a lot, especially when writing about the times we are going through, where we’ve been seeing for the past three years horror upon horror unfolding on our phones. This double violence of our watching, in spectator fashion, public lynchings, bombings of a hospital or school, or a soldier who records himself smashing up a toy shop. How these images get passed around through WhatsApp or are ingested whilst we’re scrolling with our morning coffees – and this deadening is real, because it ultimately affects our emotional responses, but also, the image itself loses meaning to the point where people can just say it’s fake, it didn’t happen. I wonder whether there is a possibility for a resurgence of the power of the word, and how we might protect or retain a more primal connection with the image.
I wanted to ask you about your relationship to the image, but also about structure, particularly the ‘Mandelstam Variables’ poems in Dog Star. Bringing together the theoretical physics of Stanley Mandelstam and the poems of Osip Mandelstam … Did it begin with one, which then offered the frame to continue with the others? Was there a central feature that connected them? In the very first one you have this line that devastated me: ‘For every goldfinch put into a poem, / one will vanish from the world outside’ [‘Mandelstam Variables – I’].
MSR: That’s fascinating, Tishani, working from Calasso’s notion of the ‘greediness of the eye’, to the ‘bulimia of the eye’, to that vivid description of the deadening excess of digital images of suffering and violence, towards the potential of poetry acting as a sort of protector of the image, and the image being something primal and mythic. The more I’ve read and thought about your new collection, the more perfect your title seems to me, as a kind of ars poetica: Egrets, While War. Yes.
Your comments also remind me of Gerard Manley Hopkins carrying out his spiritual – and poetic – exercise ‘custody of the eyes’, where he would go for weeks at his Jesuit seminary in rural Wales with his room’s window papered over, looking only at his shoes when he walked outside, denying himself all but the most mundane and essential vision. If you are doing that week after week, then you look up and see a kingfisher, it must be like a lightning bolt!
As you say, when we talk about a poetic image, it’s more than words but more than a picture too. Like you, I think a lot of my poems start with an image which ‘demands to be addressed in some way’, as you say, but sometimes it can be more like a tune, or a rhythm, then images start to attach to it. Your sense that a book of poems doesn’t become an entity until you’ve written most of it rings true for me; that sense of the poems speaking to each other and forming ‘a collection’ comes around half or two thirds of the way in, when I start to see the connections they are making.
I realise, from talking to other poets about this, that I may think about the form of a collection in a way that’s influenced by my former job as a documentary filmmaker. I was taught to make a paper-edit after watching hours of rushes, finding a line through the images that made sense. There is no direct connection between filmmaking and shaping a poetry collection, but there’s a likeness – in both finding a thread between multiple images, and those images being built into scenes – that I’ve seen in the work of other poets who were trained in filmmaking, like Jorie Graham. ‘The Mandelstam Variables’ poems came out of a longstanding fascination I’ve had for Osip Mandelstam’s poems. A couple of years ago I read his wife Nadezhda’s incredible memoirs of their lives together, and of Osip’s persecution under Stalin, and I started to write very free versions of some of his poems, riffing off them at times so tangentially that I thought they needed a different description than ‘versions’. The only other Mandelstam I’d heard of was a theoretical physicist called Stanley, who invented a method of coding particles in a scattering process, known as Mandelstam Variables. The word ‘variables’, and the scattering process, seemed to suit these poems, so I used that title for the sequence.
Michael Symmons Roberts has published nine collections of poetry. His libretti for composers have been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world, and he is a regular broadcaster and dramatist. His book length essay Quartet for the End of Time came out in paperback this year, as did his ninth book of poems Dog Star.
Tishani Doshi was born in Madras, India, and publishes poetry, novels, and essays. For fifteen years she worked as the lead dancer of the Chandralekha company and performed all over the world, and as such, the body has been a central preoccupation in her work. Egrets, While War is her fifth collection of poetry.
