Eric Roach

Eric Merton Roach was born on the eighth of March 1915 at the village of Mount Pleasant in the parish of Tobago, the eldest of seven children of Albert Roach — a small Tobagonian subsistence farmer and lay Methodist preacher — and Henrietta Roach, a homemaker. The Roach household was a Black Tobagonian peasant household of the limestone-and-cocoa hill country. He attended the Mount Pleasant Methodist Primary School through his thirteenth year and the Bishop's High School at Scarborough through 1933 on a Tobago Scholarship.

He taught at the Bishop's High School and at smaller Tobagonian primary schools through the late 1930s and the 1940s and was active from 1935 in the Tobago Pageant — the annual Tobagonian folk-cultural festival he had co-founded with the schoolmaster Lawrence Marquis. He served briefly in the British Army Field Ambulance Corps from 1943 to 1945 in the European theatre.

He published verse from 1938 in the Trinidad Guardian, in the Beacon, and in Bim — the Barbadian literary quarterly edited by Frank Collymore at Bridgetown — and from 1946 also in the Una Marson (placed in this archive) Caribbean Voices broadcasts. He was through the 1950s and 1960s the principal Tobagonian poetic voice in the Anglo-Caribbean literary circuits and one of the principal lyric voices of the rural-agricultural tradition.

His principal collected work was the posthumous volume The Flowering Rock — Collected Poems 1938-1974 of 1992, edited by Kenneth Ramchand at Trinity College, Hartford. The collection of approximately two hundred poems established the formal Tobagonian peasant-pastoral lyric as a recognised sub-tradition within the Anglo-Caribbean canon. His decisive lyric is the often-anthologised “I am the Archipelago,” addressed to the political fragmentation of the post-Federation Caribbean of the early 1960s.

He worked from 1957 as the cultural-affairs correspondent of the Trinidad Guardian and after 1968 also as the literary editor of the Tapia journal of the New World Movement of Lloyd Best.

He drowned by suicide in the Manzanilla Bay on the seventeenth of April 1974, at fifty-nine. The Eric Roach Memorial Prize for Poetry has since 1992 been the principal annual Anglo-Caribbean poetry award.

He is honored here as the lyric voice of Tobago.