Eric Merton Roach (3 November 1915 – 18 April 1974) was a Tobagonian poet and playwright.[1][2] He published some early writing under the pseudonym Merton Maloney.
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.[3]
Between 1949 and 1955, his poetry was frequently broadcast on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices.[1]
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.[1]
Work
Plays
Belle Fanto: A Medium-length Play in 3 Acts, 1967
Letter from Leonora, 1968
A Calabash of Blood (a Full-length Play in 3 acts), 1971
^Eric Roach, "Growing up in Tobago", in Michael Anthony and Andrew Carr, eds., David Frost Introduces Trinidad and Tobago, London: Andre Deutsch, 1975, pp. 147–58.
^Jean Sue Wing papers. The Alma Jordan Library, The University of the West Indies. SC 7, Box 1, Folder 5.
^Edwards, Victor (2007). A history of the Secondary Schools Drama Association and its role as an institution for the development of drama in Trinidad and Tobago (MPhil thesis). St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: The University of the West Indies.
Further reading
Laurence A. Breiner, Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry, Peepal Tree Press, 2008
