He carved out a poetic place for the smallness of the soul. The acute sense of this smallness, the sense of one’s irrelevance to the world, is an important motif in modernist Indian English poetry. In some poets it leads to a sort of self-pity. Not so in Nissim. His poems of a life time display persistent self-scrutiny. From the early works written in traditional metres to the later experimentative poems in ‘poster poems’, psalms, etc the theme spreads itself. It is therefore remarkable that a poet could write about one theme across a period of time so persistently.