E. M. Roach

Eric Merton Roach (3 November 1915 – 18 April 1974) was a Tobagonian poet and playwright.[1] He published some early writing under the pseudonym Merton Maloney.

Life

Roach grew up in Mount Pleasant, Tobago:

My village, Mount Pleasant, was a sprawling bushy compound of crude wattle or clapboard cabins with thatched or tin roofs, shabby like ourselves. In later years it seemed to me that in my boyhood we were clinging to life by the skin of our teeth and did not realise our hardship because we knew nothing else.[2]

In 1960s, Roach began to gain an international reputation. However, he became overwhelmed and depressed, and committed suicide in 1974, drinking insecticide before swimming in the ocean.[3][4]

Work

Plays
  • Belle Fanto: A Medium-length Play in 3 Acts, 1967
  • Letter from Leonora, 1968
  • A Calabash of Blood, 1971

Poems
  • The Flowering Rock: Collected Poems 1938–1974, Peepal Tree Press, 1992

References
  1. Laurence Breiner, Laureate of nowhere, Caribbean Review of Books, 10 November 2006
  2. Eric Roach, 'Growing up in Tobago', in Michael Anthony & Andrew Carr, eds., David Frost Introduces Trinidad and Tobago, London: Andre Deutsch, 1975, pp. 147-58
  3. "Eric Roach". Peepal Tree Press. Retrieved 3 August 2017.
  4. Breiner, Laurence (November 2006). "Laureate of nowhere". Caribbean Review of Books. Retrieved 3 August 2017.

Further reading
  • Laurence A. Breiner, Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry, Peepal Tree Press, 2008
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