Everything Begins Elsewhere

Tishani Doshi

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781852249366
• eBook ISBN: 9781780370767
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this, her first poetry collection since the award-winning Countries of the Body, Tishani Doshi returns to the body as a central theme, but extends beyond the corporeal to challenge the more metaphysical borders of space and time. These new poems are powerful meditations born on the joineries of life and death, union and separation, memory and dream, where lovers speak to each other across the centuries, and daughters wander into their mothers' childhoods. As much about loss as they are about reclamation, Doshi's poems guide us through an 'underworld of longing and deliverance', making the exhilarating claim that through the act of vanishing, we may be shaped into existence again. 'These poems move in different directions, as true poetry should. We hear in them joy and sadness, praise and lament, love and disenchantment -simultaneously. Tishani Doshi speaks courageously about herself, about her choices, about the growing shadows. It's a beautiful book' -Adam Zagajewski.

II

ELSEWHERE

‘Journeys to relive your past?’ was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: ‘Journeys to recover your future?’

And Marco’s answer was: ‘Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.’

ITALO CALVINO,

Invisible Cities

Buffaloes

Impossible to imagine.

Buffaloes – a dream of them:

coats thick with rain,

bodies like continents.

A whole world thundering

through Indian laburnum.

Think of beginnings:

amusement parks at dawn,

pianos, bedrooms, gods.

Think of all the invisible

insurrections it takes

to wake a city from slumber.

In these woods, a single man

will do, armed with a stick

and a paltry collection of stones.

When I see buffaloes run

I think of love – how it is held

in the meaty, muscled pink

of the tongue; how quickly

it is beaten from us –

all that brute resolve

disappearing

in the undergrowth.

After the Rains

After the rains

the temple flowers

lie like fallen soldiers –

dirtied and bloodied pink.

I want to get down

on bended knee,

gather each broken petal

to my chest.

Out there –

where the river meets

the ocean’s mouth,

it would be called

the kiss of life,

a resuscitation.

But here,

with the world washed clean,

it is nothing but a trampling.

Michael Mangal’s Dream

The nights grow long in Pillowpanja

with all the people gone,

thinks Michael Mangal,

lying insect-style on his back

where his house once used to be.

The stars seem closer too –

bare-boned, full of promises,

in this month-old lacerated sky

abandoned by the gods.

He could lie like this –

waiting for the winds to change,

for a spirit’s gentle finger to turn him over.

Or he could dream of pigs in pandanus

from Christmas lunch,

or the woman from next-door

whom he never told he loved,

to reappear from the Kingdom of the Sea

and save him.

* * *

At daybreak he will scour the beach,

sift through broken bamboo stilts

and ravaged roofs,

a million orphaned carcasses.

He will lean against the ocean floor,

and imagine

the woman from next door

is offering up her watery chest

so he can listen for the sounds

of all the friends he’s feasted with,

bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• I: EVERYTHING BEGINS
• II: ELSEWHERE
• NOTES
• About the Author
• Copyright