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.

"Markham's idiosyncratic version of monologue and persona allows for a capacious intimacy and creates a recurrent sense of fluent onward movement countered by arresting complexity..."
Sean O'Brien, The Guardian

"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."
TLS

"Looking Out, Looking In, selected work by EA Markham, begins boldly with a substantial section of first-class new poems. Their energy leaps off the page... The selection from eight previous collections reveals barer early poems, jabbing at stereotypes... But Markham's strengths are remarkably constant. 'World traveller, me', he remarks genially in a late poem (set on a Sheffield train), and all these poems open onto a world far beyond Sheffield: in Africa, where a child has 'a burnt-out bus for home', or the aftermath of revolution, where, as Markham observes sardonically, it is 'Safe now to write a little poem'."
Alison Brackenbury, Poetry Review

"A Markham poem works by keeping its declared subject, usually hinted at in the title, just off-centre of the poem's main action. The details, assembled piecemeal, do not relate directly to the poem's main concern, but taken together they position the poem and fix its nature as much as its about-ness. This tangential approach to articulation has a larger goal in mind than a poem's subject, and that is wit, the intelligence behind a poem."
Fred D'Aguiar, Poetry London

Born in 1939 on the West Indian island of Montserrat, E.A. ('Archie') Markham lived mainly in Britain and Europe from 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.