Frances Coke, Contributor

In 1999, years after a fire at home had resulted in the onset of what felt like terminal writer's block, I called a telephone number from a newspaper ad announcing a writer's workshop.

On the following Saturday I made my way to Irish Town - a long way to go without conviction.

Some time afterwards, when Irish Town had given way to Stony Hill, I wrote about a few persons I'd been hanging out with, including: a woman who kept herself together with a headband, a man who plucked lines of poetry from his bookshelf on demand, and another woman whom someone described as having become "a serious woman" - in the second half of her life.

That was Gwyneth, and though the settings varied, the experience was always as Gwyneth described it:

'a veranda

where an unrepentant traveler, facing the unknown,

found at last the altar on which to lay down her dreams.'

We came to the veranda from unconnected social and professional spheres. Away from it we were not traditional friends - never went to the movies, never went shopping, hardly visited one another and gossiped only rarely. Yet, what we shared in our pursuit of disparate dreams that congealed in the desire to write was a profound and enduring connection which is best represented by the stupor in which we have found ourselves since Monday, October 30.

So as not to do it dishonour with too much analysis, I will only say that this connection transcended some aspects of traditional friendship. As we battled with our inner selves, and with the often unyielding silence of what Gwyneth called "that faithless bitch, the muse", we drew discipline and strength from one another; offered consolation for the pain of having to drop what we thought was the magic line we had finally found at 2:00 a.m.; having to 'leave out the violins' and let the poem speak; or, the most punishing of all, having to listen to that silence broken only by the crunching up of paper and the thud of its landing in the bin.

In the early days, each of us struggled in our own way with the transition from the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" to the rigours of craft. We chided ourselves for this self-inflicted agony, referring to others who spoke of writing poems "on the way to the podium" at poetry readings, or citing McNeill's unforgettable warning, "Poetry can kill a man". We questioned our sanity for allowing ourselves to be hounded by pentameters and trochees buzzing in our ears at all hours of night. At that time Gwyneth was first and foremost the love poet, dusting out the remnants of long ago relationships like tea-leaves from a dried-out mug. The necessity for structure, for orchestration of sounds and accurate punctuation, sometimes drove her to distraction:

'when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,

Even a father could not find her'

When her social or work life had drawn her from preparation during the week, she sashayed on to the veranda, planted herself in her chair, tilted the assigned poem on her knees, pretended bold recitation while reading underneath her glasses, and finished with a flourish and a glare, daring anyone to say she didn't know the poem.

Like all of us, she often threatened to give up, especially after writing a whole page of crap just one week after writing a poem worth 'a hundred dollars'. We argued about apparent divisions and intolerance in the world of writing - Creole vs. standard; performance poetry vs. the written word; metrical order vs. free verse. A motley crew of Jamaicans led by a Trini-Jamaican man of many parts, we sometimes agonised over this 'shadocracy' of ours in which some would deny others the right to speak authentically about the Jamaican experience.

Admonished by Delores [Gauntlett] to remember Auden's assertion that "poetry makes nothing happen", we comforted ourselves with the fact that he also said poetry survives; that it is 'A way of happening, a mouth.'

We knew we were finding a way of happening, and of interior settlement, so we laid down irrelevant issues and continued the journey, believing there was space for all who would work to write better - Gwyneth with more seriousness of purpose, more hunger and more commitment than some. After a while, it was evident that Gwyneth had decided to place writing at the centre of her life - right next to Dayton, whom it sometimes displaced. But she was blessed with a partner who loved her enough to free her, for uninterrupted hours wrestling with the blank screen and for all the activities linked to writing. Thank you, Dayton, for lending her to poetry and to us. From a distance we guess that her journey enriched you also. And for the many weekends when we took off to Boscobel, Portland, Ocho Rios and Blue Mountain to recover from the stress of the preceding workshop and, importantly, to play Scrabble.

Now, to Gwyneth and Scrabble. Some of us resigned ourselves early to the impossibility of beating her. She had no respect for our elegance, long words without high-scoring letters. Gwyneth drew at will from her knowledge of unknown 2- and 3-letter words and words that had a 'Q' without a 'U', thrashing us repeatedly. We took long walks, discussed how irrelevant the rest of our lives sometimes felt, and shared outrageous plans for early retirement so we could write full-time.

Some have wondered about persons continuing in a writing workshop year after year. I don't believe anyone questions persons who keep working out at the gym, at dancing or yoga or management workshops. Clearly, Gwyneth recognised the importance of the workshop as a means of keeping her in good writing shape.

And she did not falter in her commitment to the work of poetry; this was her:

'flight to a target whose aim we'll never know,/ Vain search for one island/ that heals with its harbour.'

So in response to the assertion that "poetry makes nothing happen", I give you the most recent years of Gwyneth's life, from the distance of one who shared nothing more than the veranda and saw her become more than she was at the start - someone willing to confront who she was and who she was not; to tackle the challenge of dreaming and turning her dream into action; to invest herself in an enterprise without material reward, enduring the uncertainty of what to infer from the unsettling question: "You still writing poetry?" nuanced with the hope that the "affliction" had passed.

I saw her agonise less and less about the inessentials. I saw her face the challenge of late academic pursuits, and of illness. All this we experienced in an association that may be judged as incidental by all except those who shared it. So, for the times that we spent on the veranda, we shall always be grateful. We treasure her example of determination, hard work and courage, and for the fact that she wrote her heart out we are deeply grateful.

I think she would have liked to tell us, like Walcott's Adrian:

I would not break your heart, and you should know it;

I would not make you suffer, and you should know it;

And I am not suffering; but it is hard to know it.

I am wiser, I share the secret that is only a silence.'

We shared the secrets of our innermost selves through the words that we dared to put on paper. We shared the work to refine what we did, to make some of it acceptable for the unforgiving public glare; we shared the bin in which the ones that didn't make it were unceremoniously hurled. Sometimes we just rested from our other lives and from our own efforts, laying our heads on the words of the masters.

By the weaving of just one thread from the fabric of each of our lives, we deepened our understanding of our humanity and the humanity of others.

Two of us are missing now, Jullia and Gwyneth.

And we who are left shall be the poorer for the silence of their unwritten pages. I leave you with some lines of Walcott which I can still hear Gwyneth reading, in a voice filled with awe, in Ashley [Rosseau]'s cold, damp hillside garden, surrounded by an outburst of impatiens:

You prepare for one sorrow,

but another comes.

It is not like the weather,

you cannot brace yourself,

the unreadiness is all.

The silence

is stronger than thunder

The silence of the dead

The silence of the deepest buried love is

the one silence,

and whether we bear it for beast,

for child, for woman, or friend,

it is the one love, it is the same,

and it is blest

deepest by loss,

it is blest, it is blest.

END