Now that I have gathered these twenty poems together, I am looking for connections. Do poetry editors have a type? Declarative, formal, ironic, elegiac? Why this particular one, and not that one, and what might it have to do with this other one? What is the essence of a poem, the quality that draws you to circle around and sit with it, to hold it as though it were a flavour on your tongue?

To read over a thousand poems in a month is madness. So much depends on when the poem arrives: before breakfast, the last thing at night, that plaintive hour in the afternoon when a bird you can’t name is making its particular sound from a tree outside the window. Time is the quality I was most conscious of as an editor, as in, I’m never going to get this done. But time is precisely the element that poems have the power to alter. Even if you’re reading at speed, charging into a poem with a show me what you got, a poem can make you stop, slow down, forget about time. It can make you turn to the beginning and read it again, then read it aloud, then decide not to read any more poems for a while.  

Part of this stopping power of poems has to do with what we call voice. What the bird outside the window has too, only we don’t have the language to understand it. Voice is that mysterious thing that carries a poem, fills it with personality—leads, tricks, cajoles. It has the capacity to link the maker of the poem to the reader of the poem in the most intimate of ways, what the Sanskrit theoreticians called “sahridaya”—one with heart. Thump thump. Voice can be shape-shifting, mythic in its possibilities, making it so that as you read this tiny arrangement of words, the poem is altering something inside you, and through this alteration, changing your relationship with the world outside, which is kind of miraculous.

As I began narrowing my search for twenty poems, feeling awful as I made the inevitable decisions of no maybe, maybe no, I wanted to examine the thrill of a yes. Generally, when you say yes in ventures such as prize juries or committees for awards, you must be able to fight your corner, produce reasons for worthiness. Here, it was just me. And somehow the responsibility felt greater. Gradually, I began to see the entire exercise as one of freedom. In this age of identity politics, where so much is boxed, categorised and announced ahead of time, I was looking for poems that were somehow untethered, even as they stood firmly in territory their makers cared deeply about. So, yes, gender, yes, sex, death, illness, bodies, love, colonialism, eating disorders, ars domestica. Yes, encounters with Catullus, and Job and his wife, and Che Guevara planting a tree in Ceylon; yes, seahorses and moths and marshes and moorhens and owls and the Hofmeister Bear and a machine looking for a human pet. Yes, kissing in Birmingham, letter to Sylvia Plath, self-portrait as Agatha Christie novel, imaginary childhood friend Celery, diary of a frontier bride, uninvited poet who lives in the bathtub.

To me these were poems that seemed surprising even to themselves. They displayed no hesitancy, but retained within them, some kernel of mystery. What they shared, I suppose, was a kind of insistence.

I write this introduction a few weeks after having made my choices. Am I thinking about possible voices I did not catch or hear for whatever reason? Of course. We have all been in that room of maybe, so close, fail better etc. And nothing I offer is going to soothe except there will be other editors whose ears are tuned differently. 

I am home now, by the sea, and the brainfever bird is calling at all hours, the pitch of its utterance rising insistently above every other sound: listen listen listen. I go back and read these poems that I chose in different landscapes, different climes, and I remember the feeling of having read them the first time. How they captured something about the absurdity of being alive, how poetry can be an intervention and disruption; subversive, funny and tender all at once. Now that I read them one after the other, it seems these poems were meant to belong together. I hope you join your hearts to them too.

— Tishani Doshi
July 2024