Arts for the 21st Century

Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips
Writer

Esther Phillips gained an MFA in Creative Writing in 1999 from the University of Miami, and won the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets for her poetry collection/thesis. She went on to win the Frank Collymore Literary Award as well as the Governor General’s Award for Literary Excellence. Her published works include Chapbook, La Monte (UWI), When Ground Doves Fly (Ian Randle Publishers) The Stone Gatherer, Leaving Atlantis and Witness in Stone (Peepal Tree Press.) Her poetry is published in several anthologies, regionally and internationally and her work has been recorded by the Poetry Archive, U.K. Esther Phillips is founder and director of Writers Ink Inc. as well as the Bim Literary Festival & Book Fair. She is editor of BIM: Arts for the 21st Century and producer of CBC radio programme, What’s That You’re Reading? She initiated the Bridgetown Literary Tour and was Chair of the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Committee from 2019-2021. In March, 2018, Esther Phillips was appointed first Poet Laureate of Barbados.

MEMORY

If sharing between two makes a memory complete, what happens when one forgets, and every Do you remember? is met with a blank look. A shake of the head, No, I don’t remember. I don’t remember at all.

Mountain

He said to me, “You’re a poet. Make these days brighter. Turn the world into glass. Give us your seer’s eyes to see the red

Editor’s Note - November 2020

It is a pleasure and honour to welcome to the BIM November issue a contribution by The Right Honourable Mia Amor Mottley M.P; Q.C., our first female Prime Minister of Barbados. Even as we extend this welcome to her, we sadly bid farewell to the late Prime Minister Owen Arthur who was instrumental in reviving this iconic magazine in 2007. We think it fitting that this issue should be dedicated to his memory.

NEGUS 2

It is It is how you slash and burn an entire lexicon to rule among the harbingers of language; how you trust yourself to the trance of words, yet sound your oumfô for the dispossessed, the voiceless. It is evening now. If only for a while, come to this Kingdom where crows do not fly; the woo-dove builds her nest in olive branches.

Imagining and Other Poems by C.M Harclyde Walcott

Enigmatic. Cryptic. C. M. Harclyde’s poetic structure is one that may best be described as minimalist: just the right amount of paint on the tip of the brush, followed by the deft stroke, so that nothing other than what is intended leaks past the precise feeling. But then, so much seems intended; more than is stated in Walcott’s select shading and the deliberate slant of his thought as expressed on the page
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