An Artist Of Language

With a performance that kept the audience enthralled Tishani Doshi launched her new book of poems Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods amid SHE – an art exhibition of women artists at The Cube gallery. The internationally acclaimed poet talks to curator Samira Sheth about her unique craft

- Samira Sheth

TISHANI Doshi is a poet, and an accomplished and well acclaimed one at that. But it is her lineage in dance, with the legendary Chandralekha as a mentor, that really transforms her text into something else entirely. She takes the written text of the poems – beautiful in their distilled power – and adds elements of the spoken word and dance to perform them. Every gesture, every word comes together to convey a stunning clarity and purity of emotion. The sheer grace, strength and power of this enactment have to be seen to be fully experienced. Luckily, for audiences in Goa, they were privy to this deeply moving performance at the launch of Tishani’s new book of poems Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods held in an unusual venue – amongst the artworks at SHE.

Here, she speaks to the curator about dance, poetry, the new book and how living on a beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and three dogs shapes her distinctive practice.

How did Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods come together as a collection?