Eric Roach

Eric Merton Roach was born on the third of November 1915 in the village of Mount Pleasant, Tobago, to a family of the island's small farming folk. He grew up close to the land and the sea that would fill his verse, and the rhythms of rural Tobagonian life — its labor, its folklore, its churchyards and cane — became the deep well from which he drew.

Educated at Bishop's High School in Tobago, Roach became a schoolteacher before joining the army in Trinidad in 1939. He first published under the pen name Merton Maloney, and between 1949 and 1955 his poems were broadcast regularly on the BBC's celebrated program Caribbean Voices, which carried the emerging voices of the West Indies to the wider world. In 1954 he set aside his post to give himself more fully to writing, and in 1961 moved to Trinidad, where he worked chiefly as a journalist.

Though best known as a lyric poet, Roach also wrote for the stage, authoring the plays Belle Fanto (1967), Letter from Leonora (1968), and A Calabash of Blood (1971). His poetry wrestled with freedom, culture, and the meaning of Caribbean identity in the years of independence, and critics came to regard him as among the most significant poets of the English-speaking Caribbean in the generation between Claude McKay and Derek Walcott.

Eric Roach died on the eighteenth of April 1974. His collected poems were gathered as The Flowering Rock: Collected Poems 1938–1974, preserving a body of work rooted in the soil of Tobago. He remains the honored lyric voice of his island — a keeper of its landscape and its people, whose song still rises from the flowering rock of home.