E. M. Roach

Eric Merton Roach, who published as E. M. Roach (1915-1974) was a West Indian poet and playwright. He published some early writing under the pseudonym Merton Maloney.

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.

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