Leaving Atlantis Format: Paperback

Leaving Atlantis is a suite of poems that explores the unstable territory between public and private. They are addressed to the great Barbadian novelist and thinker, George Lamming, the silent but speaking partner in a relationship of love that comes between two writers when “your flag is flying at half-mast”. The suite works at multiple levels, as a record of the negotiation of feelings, permissions, exclusions and treaties between two persons who have to confront the reality of long lives that have accumulated “memories I cannot share”, and not least that the poet is a woman of deep religious faith, and the man a lifelong Marxist and non-believer. More than a portrait, fascinating and intimate as it is, of a public man; more than an exploration of the writing of the man for clues about what he might be thinking (and an acceptance of the ultimate mystery and unknowability of the intimate other), this is a suite of poems about the miracle of love, and how it may come at any time.

Esther Phillips was born in Barbados, where she still resides. She is featured at the Poetry Archive and BBC Poetry postcards, and her poems have represented Barbados at both the Olympics and Commonwealth Games. Esther Phillips has performed at many international literary festivals and her poems appear in several landmark anthologies including Poetas de caribe anglophono and Give the Ball to the Poet. She is the editor of Bim: Arts for the 21st Century and founder of Writers Ink Inc., and the Bim Literary Festival & Book Fair. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami, and won Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets for her poetry thesis. Her poetry collections include When Ground Doves Fly and The Stone Gatherer.