Contribution of Eunice D'Souza

Eunice has been widely acclaimed as a poet, novelist and anthologist of nineteenth and twentieth century Indian Writing. She was also a critic, columnist and writer for children.
Her first book of poetry 'Fix' was hailed as "...a practically perfect book, and one of the most brilliant first books I have encountered." Most of the poems seem at first to be caricatures of the Goan community, but are infact minutely observed revelation, occasionally indulgent but more often critical. There are also several wrenching poems about the poet's own fraught and unresolved relationships. Her mix of trenchant observation and confessional with more than a touch of self-deprecation and black humour became her distinctive style, reappearing in later collections, Women in Dutch Painting, Ways of Belonging, Selected and New Poems, and a Necklace of Skulls, unbashed even in her last volume Learn from the Almond Leaf. For Eunice, poetry was a process of consciously crafting and rewriting and revising every word and line.
Despite her formidable reputation, Eunice was tremedously admired and loved as a professor of English at St. Xavier's College. Her lectures were mesmerising experiences where all that mattered was the life of the mind. Eunice had a fierce sense of justice and fair play, and fought extensively in the university teachers' union and at St.Xavier's for the rights of teachers and students.