Tregenza A. Roach
The poetry in this collection is informed by the memory of ancestors and is motivated as well by my personal struggle to define a vision of life. The poems are arranged loosely into five categories: Ancestors and Memory, Passages, The Natural World, The Spiritual Life, and Love and Other Essences. The classification is loose, because each piece is part of the greater story and may play more than one such role in the telling. This work is very personal, but I share it, because this is the reason why we come to the world, to share, just in the event a word we make may create a beauty somewhere or ease some burden another may carry. I hope you find something in what is written here that helps in the celebration of life unfolding.
Tregenza A. Roach was born in Sandy Point, St. Kitts and moved with his family to St. Thomas in the United States Virgin Islands when he was eight years of age. The complications of migration, even between two small islands resting so closely together, were enormous, and they have shaped an imagination of incredible breadth. The memory which inspires his poetry is rooted in the canefields and fishing villages of a largely agrarian St. Kitts of the 1960s and the booming commercial port of Charlotte Amalie which offers a stark contrast to the idyll.
Some of the works in this collection are here published for the first time. Others have been published in three volumes of The Caribbean Writer, Calabash Journal of New York University, Yellow Cedars Blooming and Seasoning for the Mortar. Roach was recognized for his work in the 20th edition of The Caribbean Writer with his selection for the Marguerite Cobb McKay prize. His short story Sara of Sinoe was chosen for the Margaret A. Walker fiction prize by the Detroit Writers Guild in 1999.
Roach serves on the adjunct faculty of The University of the Virgin Islands where he teaches in law and the humanities.
You
You walk the way you talk.
You laugh the way you run.
You sing the way you weep.
You touch the way you smile.
You love the way you whisper.
You love the way you dance.
You love the way you worship.
You are my dream at morning,
and at night as I lie wide awake.
Tregenza A. Roach
