The question becomes how today’s poets can integrate a necessary lyricism – what we might call hope – with honesty about the dangerous state of the world. Very few contemporaries manage this, which is why Tishani Doshi’s Egrets, While War is such a significant work.

FASHION ASIDE, what we mostly turn to poetry for remains something to do with beauty and meaning – what we might call the lyric impulse. Yet pure lyricism can seem indulgent, and just plain inaccurate, in a world familiar with suffering and catastrophe. But this familiarity is nothing new. “About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters,” as W.H. Auden pointed out in 1938. And so, the question becomes how today’s poets can integrate a necessary lyricism – what we might call hope – with honesty about the dangerous state of the world.

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