Caribbean Modern Classics

This is a second, significantly revised, edition of the work of Eric Roach, who with Claude McKay and Louise Bennett was the Caribbean's most important poet before the generation of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. It collects the poems published in literary journals between 1938-1973, Roach's early pseudonymous work and a substantial selection of his unpublished poems from manuscript. The collection is edited and introduced by Kenneth Ramchand, Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies.

When the first edition appeared in 1992, it was recognised as one of the most important Caribbean publishing events of recent years. This second edition adds a number of rediscovered poems and includes significant variants of a number of Roach's most important poems.

"The most splendid voice of the Caribbean Renaissance (1948-1972)."
Kamau Brathwaite

Eric Merton Roach was born in 1915 in Tobago. As well as three plays - Belle Fanto (1967), Letter from Leonora (1968) and A Calabash of Blood (1971) - he accumulated an impressive body of poetry. In 1974, leaving behind 'Finis', a suicide note transformed into art, Roach drank insecticide and swam out to sea at Quinam Bay, itself the subject of his fine poem 'At Quinam Bay'. He was posthumously awarded the Trinidad and Tobago National Hummingbird Gold Medal in 1974.