One of the most powerful poems by Trinidad and Tobago’s controversial poet Eric Roach is one called ‘Verse in August.’ Roach, a fairly minor poet in the hierarchy of West Indian writers raises interest and controversy because of the contradictory state of his politics as expressed in his poetry, drama and criticism. At one juncture he seemed a firm progressive Africanist while at another the ‘dark clouds’ of Black activism and revolutionary poetic developments drew his denunciation and drove him into depression between 1970 and 1974.
Despite crying down the new radical black poetry as backward and unprogressive “wallowing in the murky waters of race and slavery,” he wrote a play Calabash of Blood set in
