Arts for the 21st Century

Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips
Writer

Esther Phillips has been the editor of Bim: Arts for the 21st Century since 2007. She is the author of La Montée, When Ground Doves Fly, The Stone Gatherer, Leaving Atlantis, Witness in Stone, and is currently working on her new collection, Plantation, which focuses on the experiences of enslaved African women brought to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave Trade. Esther is the founder of Writers Ink Inc., co-producer of the CBC programme What’s That You’re Reading? as well as co-producer of the Bridgetown Literary Bus Tour. She is Poet Laureate of Barbados.

Hanging on a Thread

In his most recent poetry collection, Last Reel, Mervyn Morris dedicates his “Movie Poem” to Jimmy Cliff. This suggests that the poet has borrowed the title from the acclaimed 1972 Jamaican movie, The Harder They Come, in which Cliff plays the lead role.

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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