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. What the poems also deal with in a moving but
resolutely unsentimental way is the fact that the age of one of the
partners makes the temporal finiteness of the relationship a matter
of acute awareness. What is the poet to think when she sees the man
throwing out and putting his papers in order? "Clearing out?" The
poems also meditate on the ironies of a relationship with a man who
has both been public property as a writer and a leader of the
struggle for Caribbean sovereignty, but also an intensely private
person, habituated to a life of movement and temporariness. Quite
literally, Leaving Atlantis references the moment when the writer
is forced to leave, with a rude absence of notice, the hotel at
Bathsheba on the Atlantic coast of Barbados, his refuge for many
years. Is the relationship and provision of a home a "Coming Home",
the arrival at a place of rest after the turbulence of a life of
struggle, or does it threaten a loss of autonomy after a life of
privacy and independence? What of sovereignty now when "I am your
dotage, your vulnerable/ season"? 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.
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