Poet Insight - Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips
Born 1950 in Barbados

Phillips’ work is characterized by its faith, a faith in her country, in the poet’s craft, and in ‘the master craftsman’ of Christian belief. 

As Jane King has said of her work in the Caribbean Review of Books, ‘God’s willingness is quietly present in a way that may be possible only in post-colonial spaces, now that the metropolitan academy has become so relentlessly post-Christian’. 

Yet Phillips is keen to stress the influence of what she terms Western Classical Literature, particularly on the technical craft and range of language in Shakespeare, Eliot, and Heaney.

Some Highlights 

• MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami,1999
• Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets
• Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award, 2001
• Appointed the first Poet Laureate of Barbados, 2018
• Sunday columnist of the Nation newspaper
• Editor of BIM Magazine
• Artistic Director of BIM Literary Festival & Book Fair
• Founder and Director of Writers Ink Inc. Barbados
• Creator and a senior consultant for the Bridgetown Literary Bus Tour 
• Host and producer of What’s That You’re Reading? (Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation Radio network)

Literary Works

• La Montee (University of West Indies Press, 1983)
• When Ground Doves Fly (Ian Randle Publishers, 2003)
• Poetas de Caribe anglophono (Casa de las Americas, 2011) 
• Give the Ball to the Poet (Cambridge-Homerton, 2014)
• Leaving Atlantis (Peepal Tree Press)
• The Stone Gatherer (Peepal Tree Press, 2009)
• Witness in Stone (Peepal Tree Press)

Sources
https://poetryarchive.org/poet/esther-phillips/
https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/esther-phillips

Memory - Esther Phillips

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.

Then it strikes you that you never really knew,

Could not have known, the exact map of his memories.

Their colours and contours, nuances, their proper indentations.

How long each stood in the queue waiting for his admittance.

So come, memories of mine, let me light candles and burn sweet incense for you.

Let me summon that day when, for the first time, we sat and talked until late in the evening.

It wasn’t so much what we said, but the way that trust, ever drawn by the open heart, Came in and settled itself in the room.

It was then I felt that whatever might come, I could find such moments again,

Or it would be worth the seeking.

Or the way he danced with three-year-old Zoë (not knowing I observed him),

But I saw how the tensions he had so carefully nurtured slipped for a while,

His face transformed by such delight, such gentleness!

I held that memory against the harsher times

When neither words nor silences could counter disillusionment, or

Calm the impatience with a world gone deaf to those ideals he had fought for all his life.

And how his voice could turn a lecture into a symphony!

His power of intellect, the elegant phrasing that rose or fell

on the under song of ocean tides, multi-tiered resonances, the soft swell of waves,

Water sifting through pebbles.

Where do I store a voice that caused the blood to leap inside the veins,

The mind to sound out depths I had hardly known,

The ear to hear how chords, captured within a phrase,

Could reinterpret meaning, spark illumination!

Now, I no longer ask, Do you remember...?

Esther Phillips

https://www.bimmag.org/stories/memory

Mortality, Sloughed

Mortality, Sloughed

There is a resilient pain

like a thread running through men

I stretch my muscles but its a cramp lodged in an organ somewhere out of reach

out of sight, never out of mind

Paul penned it best when he said we are most wretched indeed

there is a deep misery in this mortality

Who can deliver us from this flesh of death?

Who can bring this pain, this pain? this special pain!

Who can assuage it? Who can heal it?

Where can I go to get rid of it?

The only way to get over is to go through

words I've lived by

I like a lamb for the slaughter, daily dying, I surrender

This cross and its afflictions are our daily delight

Our daily bread, our normal life

There are no other duties on this narrow path

It is rife with sufferings and squeezing-s

Divesting and being divested

Stripped, stretched and transformed from the inside out

Who can switch off this pain response?

Who can tell my soul to breathe and my body to rest?

There is a weight inside me, like millstone around my inner neck

Drawing me down, deep into the darkness

I claw and I fight the heaviness, it smothers and stifles me

I don't want to go quietly into the night, down into the cold

I fear I'll never rise again

The only hope I have is Him who appears to all men

The Sun of Righteousness, bringing healing in His rising rays

I yearn for the warmth and succor

I just, dunno yes

I just tyad...

My head and heart hurts and I'm confused

My will fighting against the supreme will?

Laughable at best, and absolutely pitiable.

 

So abandon fleshy hope all ye who enter

This is no palm Sunday prance but a funeral march

A narrow squeeze, a spelunking of sorts to Calvary's cross

Where the whispers of sufferings are lost in the furor of forgiveness 

So like Him, I lay my mortal coil down

And in the sea of the father's grace I drown.

-cocoa.tea poetry

Beneath the press...is the presence

Beneath the press...is the presence

Once you get past the sorrow, the heavy sadness,

you realize just how angry you are,

There's a sense of futility and powerlessness

How do you fight back, as a slave?

Should you?

I'm grateful God knows my heart and can bear the weight of me.

- cocoaTea.poetry