Meeting poets I am disconcerted sometimes
 by the colour of their socks
 the suspicion of a wig
 the wasp in the voice
 and an air, sometimes, of dankness.

 Best to meet in poems:
 cool speckled shells
 in which one hears
 a sad but distant sea.

The third of “Five London Pieces”.

This is my favourite Eunice de Souza poem. She always keeps it simple and straight, without using too many words. The suggestion is that poetry is distant from poets as sea shells are from the sea… as if the work of art creates a distance between itself and the artist…

— Gauri

Biography

Eunice de Souza was born in Pune, India in 1940, and educated there. She received an MA from Marquette University in Wisconsin and a PhD from Bombay in 1988. She is now a lecturer in English in St Xavier’s College, Bombay. Apart from writing extensively on contemporary literature and culture, she has written four books for children, and was the co-editor of Statements (1976), an anthology of Indian prose in English. Her collections of verse are Fix (1979), Women in Dutch Painting (1988), and Ways of Belonging: New and Selected Poems (1990); the last of these was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.