"Many of the poems address absent figures: a lost grandmother, a mother later to be lost, former lovers, schoolfriends, mentors. Typically they hold their interlocutors with verbally dextrous, digression-filled narrations that start in medias res, resist closure and defy summary. Their apparent anxiety about incompleteness or uncertainty of context is much more than a postmodern posture."—Times Literary Supplement
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation
Aptly described by Gavin Ewart as a writer of great intelligence and vitality who can command a very powerful wry political comment’, E.A. Markham was a leading light in British Caribbean writing. He was a poet, novelist and short story writer, essayist and anthologist. He completed this selection of poems from his previous books, together with an opening section of nearly fifty new poems, shortly before his death in Paris at Easter, 2008.
Born in 1939 on the West Indian island of Montserrat, E.A. (Archie’) Markham lived mainly in Britain and Europe since the mid-1950s. Among other things he worked as a media co-ordinator in Papua New Guinea, edited Artrage’, directed the Caribbean Theatre Workshop, and finally ran the Creative Writing department at Sheffield Hallam University for ten years until retiring in 2005, when he moved to Paris. His last book of poems, A Rough Climate’, was shortlisted for the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize.