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Books on Caribbean Writers
Kenneth Ramchand, ed.
West
Indian Narrative: An Introductory Anthology. Nelson Thornes
Ltd; Rev Ed edition (June 1980)
Laurence A. Breiner,
Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean
Poetry. Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2007
Laurence A. Breiner,
An Introduction toe West Indian Poetry. Cambridge
University Press, 2003
Eric Roach,
The Flowering Rock. Peepal
Tree Press Ltd, 1991
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Eric Roach and the Flowering Rock
Eric Merton Roach,
father of Colin Roach, was born 1915 at
Mount Pleasant Tobago. After a secondary
education at Bishop's High School, Tobago, he entered
the teaching profession. In 1939, he joined the army in
Trinidad and served as a volunteer with the South
Caribbean forces during World War II.
His first poems, some written
as Merton Maloney, date from this period. After a
short stint in the Civil Service, he worked as a
journalist with the Trinidad Guardian and The
Nation. He was also a regular contributor to the
BBC Caribbean Voices programme.
At the age of 39, he
turned his attention to writing and produced many short
stories, poems, plays, articles, and a radio serial.
He married in 1952 and in 1954
he left his job to devote his time to writing. By 1960,
though he had accumulated an impressive body of work,
including many anthologised poems and publication in
Bim, Kyk-over-Al and other journals, there
were no offers of publication and he returned to
teaching.
In 1961, he
moved to Trinidad where he worked chiefly as a
journalist. In 1973, he again resigned in order to
devote more time to his writing. In 1972, he had
published a fiercely critical review of the new
Caribbean poetry published in Savacou ¾ (‘Tribe
Boys vs Afro-Saxons’) and in the absence of the
publication of his own poetry of this period, which was
indeed much closer in spirit to the Savacou collection
than his somewhat intemperate review suggested, he was
widely castigated for what were perceived as reactionary
views.
Almost equally, he was
taken up as a stick with which to beat the leading
figures in the Caribbean revolution in the arts by its
opponents. In the process, Roach’s own poetry was
ignored. 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 a fine
poem ‘At Quinam Bay’ full of intimations of wearied
ending.
Source:
Eric Roach Collection
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The Flowering Rock: Collected Poems, 1938-1974
By Eric Merton Roach
This collection brings
together for the first time the work of one of the
Caribbean's major poets. It collects the poems published
in 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 Professor Kenneth Ramchand.—Publisher,
Peepal Tree Press, 1992
This is an
extremely important book. Before its appearance no
literary historian or critic, let alone lover of poetry,
will have been able to measure the full richness of West
Indian poetic creation. One always suspected that Eric
Roach was one of the major West Indian poets. This book
consolidates his name in a pantheon which includes at
least Claude McKay, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett,
Martin Carter
and Kamau Brathwaite.
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I think what I respond to most is Roach's passion for
the land and the people, both of which are so clearly
and categorically West Indian. The intense feeling that
informs his best poetry - and so much of the poetry is
good—expresses a very specific yearning for a shared
identity which will leap over island isolation and bind
together our fragmented historical consciousness into a
coherent whole.—Ian
McDonald
The most splendid voice
of the Caribbean Renaissance
(1948-1972) . . . precious confounded Yeatsian & still
utterly Caribbean statements.
—Kamau
Brathwaite
This first
publication of Roach’s poetic corpus is quite simply a
major literary event.— Laurence
Breiner
Source:
Peepal Tree Press
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Poems by Eric Roach
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Finis
night casts
its blanket
on the wood
blacker than blindness
nothing breaks midnight now
the fireflies died
life’s candles flickered out
darkness has entered
at the pores of love
and joy and grief
and art and song
now sound is silence
silence
silence
a man has passed
into the heart of darkness
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The Flowering Rock
In fierce hot noons
Neath homestead trees
Our village girls
Breastfeed their young
Whose cradle is a song,
And in our valley
The stream water croons
Cool rhythms among stones.
Our hearts break not
Though they are ever broken,
A froth of laughter
Tops our sea of sorrows,
our singing sighs like zephyrs
In night silence:
Our voices bear the tracery of tears,
The burden of their cadence.
Oh from gaunt rock
As white as sanctity
The lily blooms:
Essence of darkness is
Too pure for fragrance,
The distilled stone,
The still voice of the skeleton.
This is our symbol -
Beauty famous in the slum;
The hungry boy who
Tomorrow shall become
The country’s hero;
The black loam bears him,
He breeds recurrent
In our fertile womb.
Day breaks, my darling:
Night, cast with eldritch dreams
Shrinks from these shores,
Light flickers on horizons;
Our souls like sunflowers
Turn toward the dawning:
Our hope begins its orisons.
Source:
Eric Merton Roach
The Flowering Rock: Collected
Poems, 1938-1974 |
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Black Yeats
Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean
Poetry
By Laurence A. Breiner
In this impressive and much-needed book,
Laurence Breiner sets out to present a study
of Eric Roach “as a publishing poet . . .
concentrating on how Roach in fact presented
himself—or found himself presented—before
the world of his contemporaries.” This means
that while the work of Roach the Tobagonian
playwright, fiction writer, and journalist
exists as a sort of sunk context surrounding
or permeating much within the scope of
Breiner’s consideration, by the time page
279 (or page 297, for those who read
endnotes) is reached, Roach stands forth
from the crowd of named and unnamed tragic
Caribbean figures who have pre-empted their
natural time, forcing the sea to swallow
them up (his suicide was in 1974)—to be
known as himself, as much more than the
author of the occasional anthologised
federationist verse or the “hurt hawk”
subject of posthumous tributes . . . |
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It is through his literary skill as writer and reader,
working with his historical knowledge, that Breiner
establishes his interpretations of Roach’s evolving
sense of self as a federationist poet, and the tragedy
of this rural Tobagonian whose voice did not find itself
heard in time for the times according to which it
launched song and endeavoured speech.— Vahni
Capildeo,
Caribbean Review of Books
Laurence A. Breiner is the author of
An Introduction to West Indian Poetry and a
member of the African-American studies faculty at
Boston University, where he teaches Caribbean,
postcolonial, and 17th-century literatures. He lives
in Boston.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update
11 January 2012
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