Engaging with Eunice de Souza’s work through the collected poems in Volcano, edited by Melanie Silgardo and Vidyan Ravinthiran, is a return to the defiant heat of the tropical summer and the incisive wit that characterises her poetry. Sharp and fearless, de Souza’s voice strikes with clarity and unapologetic candour. Singularly bold, her poems are not just an act of literary engagement, but they question conventions and wield satire, irony, and tenderness with equal deftness. Volcano brings together de Souza’s poems spanning nearly four decades from 1979 to 2017 and offers a panoramic view of her poetic evolution from the first book, Fix, to the last, Learn from the Almond Leaf. Ravinthiran (who in his Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir says that poem is a tiny kingdom you can step into, anytime, and return from – readier to hold your own, no matter what comes) delights the readers with a fine and erudite introductory essay to de Souza’s poems underscoring that “We too are de Souza’s students. Let’s not disappoint her.”
The first poem in Volcano, Eunice de Souza’s collected poems, “Catholic Mother”, which appeared in her debut collection, Fix, lands like a quiet but devastating punch. Its brevity doesn’t dilute its force. Instead, de Souza uses silence and subtlety to deliver a critique more potent than rhetoric. In “Marriages Are Made”, she lays out a cynical checklist for what constitutes a “marriageable” woman, and the loaded title does not escape notice. “Feeding the Poor at Christmas” and “Sweet Sixteen” are fine examples of how she wields humour as both shield and sword. I recall reading “Sweet Sixteen” a few years ago and marvelling at how de Souza turned adolescent innocence on its head, skewering societal expectations with piercing wit. Her endings, often abrupt, are like trapdoors – pulling the reader into deeper reflections beneath seemingly light surfaces.
Fierce satire
In “Idyll,” barely 17 lines long, de Souza writes, “When Goa was Goa / my grandfather says / the bandits came / over the mountains / to our village / only to splash / in cool springs / and visit Our Lady’s Chapel.” This poem was published at a time when Goa was still a Union Territory. In his Introduction, Vidyan Ravinthiran writes that de Souza doesn’t repeat but frames (critiques, palpates both diagnostically and cherishingly) the structure of anecdote. He goes on to explain how the word “idyll” was originally, returning to Theocritus – not a pastoral heaven, but a poem about such a place, a literary genre. He draws attention to how another voice rises, ironical, impatient with the rose-tinting of the past, and serves as a resistance to the present mode, a mode of disapproval. In the poem, “Mrs Hermione Gonsalves”, through the monologue of a woman obsessed with her fading beauty and her dark-skinned husband, de Souza paints a portrait of racial and class prejudice. The poem’s closing, almost comic in tone – where women flee from the sight of Mr Gonsalves, thinking the devil himself had arrived – is satire in its most unrepentant form. De Souza seeks neither sanction nor sympathy; her satire stands independent, fierce, and undiluted.
We mustn’t forget that, teaching as she did in Bombay University as early as 1969, de Souza occupied a unique space in a transforming India – one where educated, working women still had to navigate deeply entrenched patriarchal norms. In the poem “My Students”, she addresses this with characteristic humour. Ravinthiran observes how even his own students at Harvard University found her voice startlingly fresh and contemporary, despite its decades-old origins.
Her poems repeatedly challenge religious piety and passive femininity. In “Bequest”, she turns the lens inward, revealing her vulnerability. She longs to be a “wise woman,” smiling endlessly and emptily like a plastic flower. In all candour, she suggests that self-love must become an act of radical charity – bequeathing one’s heart like a spare kidney, even to an enemy. The poem’s startling self-awareness points to the deeper struggle: the real enemy is often within, and the absolution lies in confronting ourselves honestly.
Unsentimental and pragmatic
This leads one to question: Can de Souza’s work be classified as confessional poetry? While I am against reading a poet’s work as autobiography, it’s difficult to ignore how her poems draw from fiercely individual insights. In the poem “Advice to Women”, one reads, ‘Keep Cats / if you want to learn to cope with / the otherness of lovers. Otherness is not always neglect / Cats return to their litter trays / when they need to.” Stripped down of any emotional drama, this poem in its sane voice says how “the stare of perpetual surprise / in those great green eyes / will teach you / to die alone.” One encounters her refusal to sentimentalise or philosophise unnecessarily. “Forms without ache are futile,” she states in “Otherness/Wise”, quoting a painter friend, before admitting she’d rather it weren’t so. The hard-to-miss image of de Souza, whom I have known only through her poems, is that of her gazing long to the light beyond the window, a parrot perched on her head. Therefore, a particularly vivid memory is piqued, reading her 2011 poem, “Pahari Parrots” where, “At the sight of Campari the parrots make / little weak-kneed noises / Toth pulls the glass one way / Tothi the other/both hang on when I pull / It’s a regular bar-room brawl.” This balance between detachment and empathy, irony and affection, is what sets her poetry apart.
Even in the face of loss and mortality, de Souza resists sentimentality. In “Mid-Sentence”, she peels down language to its core: “Finis. Kaput. Dead.” It is blunt, almost jarring in its simplicity, particularly within the landscape of Indian English poetry, where death is often draped in spiritual abstraction. In “My Mother Feared Death”, she writes: “Alive or dead, mothers are troubling / Mine came back and said, ‘I’m lonely.’” It's an honest, unsentimental recognition of grief – painful, yes, but also clear-eyed and unsparing.
Reading de Souza’s poems is also deeply personal, reminding me of the conversations with my atheist father, who with his wise humour and sharp sarcasm pierced through pretences. Her poem “Sacred River” offers a mundane, almost absurdist portrayal of a river visit, far from the ornamental spirituality often associated with prayer rituals at the ghats. One does not miss her empathy for animals. I am yet to come across a pregnant half-starved stray dog in a poem. She deploys language as easily as a shovel when she says “a white man playing at being a sadhu/ top knot and all,’ concluding “nothing stops faith/ it will be heaven to get out of here.” Few poets have confronted romanticised symbols as bracingly as de Souza. Take, for instance, where she admonishes: “Koel, stop those cries/ I can’t take it this morning/ We’ll survive somehow.” The line encapsulates so much of de Souza’s ethos: unsentimental, pragmatic, and dryly humorous.
Ravinthiran writes that de Souza’s poems are essential to him for their tight technique, the speech rhythms in them that never cloy, but mostly for the push-and-pull they evince, outlining piecemeal, a personality pursuing an impracticable equilibrium. Melanie Silgardo, who had known de Souza for more than forty years, first as a student, then publisher and friend, says about de Souza’s poems that “she honed and whittled till she got to the nub of things. Her language was always precise, her cadence colloquial, her punctuation minimal, her ear exact.”
Volcano prompts a reflection on the many silences – literary and personal – I’ve allowed to persist. Eunice de Souza’s work doesn’t ask for admiration; it demands attention. And in doing so, it reshapes how we think about truth, satire, womanhood, faith, and poetry itself. It is not without reason that one chances upon Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s “Elegy for E”: “She’s dead / you still dial her number / You dial Fix / You dial Dutch Painting / you dial Almond Leaf / It always connects / She always answers / The phone herself / How does she do it / Line after line?”
Volcano: Collected Poems, Eunice De Souza, Penguin India.
