E. A. Markham, who died in Paris on Easter Day, was born on the Caribbean island of Monserrat in 1938, coming to London in his teens. He made himself a difficult writer to classify. A writer of plays and short stories as well as poems, he would write in personae, such as that of the Welsh feminist Sally Goodman, to vary his perspective still further. A colleague of his at Sheffield Hallam University, where they taught the highly successful Creative Writing course, Sean O'Brien, has described Markham as "tireless in his resistance to orthodoxy, whether artistic, cultural or political".

"The Widow's Eulogy", published in the TLS in December 2006, exemplifies the rapid dramatic sketching of his later poems.

The Widow’s Eulogy

Well, there were two things that alerted you to the unusual
Tone of the marriage, the fact that the new widow chose to give
The Eulogy – strange in itself – but also that she canvassed
Opinion about him: he was known, of course, to be a superb
Cook, a traveller and – dare one say it here? – a favourite with
The ladies. It’s useful to think that the compiling of notes
On someone close to you is another of those activities
Intended to contain the grief. Anyway, she seems OK.

She inhabits the podium as if a preacher born to it.
The dress is, ah, fetching as a US Secretary of State’s.
She surveys the congregation, severe and businesslike
In her glasses, and begins the tribute. Much of what she says
We might have said, though his generosity goes wider than
We knew. And yes, the love of cooking, the sociability
Is stressed, before the pause, before the punchline; and then she says,
We never suffered food-poisoning. He never gave me AIDS.

E. A. MARKHAM (2006)

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