A Portable Paradise

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I write prose for a living; sometimes I write prose that evokes a sense of experience, but more often than not I finish up evoking little more than the scientific (broadly defined) analysis involved in problem solving and social interpretation. I remain more than a little in awe of poets whose vision and efficiency of evocation takes us into wonder and fear, beauty and awe and the quiet delight of the everyday. Really good ones see their writing accompanied by an ability to read that work and take us as an audience into that evoked world. My first experience of Roger Robinson’s work was a few years ago when I heard him read, and I was hooked, drawn into his world. The collection’s title points to the underlying philosophy expressed in these poems: that earthly joy is, or ought to be, just within, but is often just beyond our reach, denied by racism, misogyny, physical cruelty and those with the class power to deny others their share of worldly goods and pleasures. A Portable Paradise is not the emptiness of material accumulation, but joy in an openness to people, places, the sensual pleasures of food and the rewards to be had from the arts of word, sound and visual enticement – in short an “insatiable hunger” for life. The poems express a fierce anger against injustice, but also convey the irrepressible sense that Roger Robinson cannot help but love people for their humour, oddity and generosity of spirit.

The complexity of human experience is what pulsates from the poems by Roger Robinson in his latest collection, awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize, “A Portable Paradise”. Robinson, in crystal clear language, free of trite embellishments, writes about pain, love, rage, injustice, trauma, hope and resilience. These are the poems to read, reread and relive. A Portable Paradise was launched at an event at Tate Modern on 28 June, and published on 11 July. The book was awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize at a glitzy ceremony on Monday 13 January 2020 at the Southbank Centre. Throughout this selection of recordings, Robinson’s ethereal imagery, which gives the reader the impression of having one foot in this life and one in another realm, is frequently borne out in his engagement with form. ‘Day Moon’, a sonnet, uses this traditional set form to bend the often-deafening whiteness of the contemporary British nature poem, and many of these pieces comply with the parameters of the Japanese haibun, as short descriptions of a place, person or object, or else an account of the speaker’s journey. Ultimately, the poems in A Portable Paradise – whether read or listened to – are incantatory, and, like prayers, they generate hope, ‘the fresh hope of morning’ (‘A Portable Paradise’). And after that, then, maybe, after I’ve done some of that work, I can think about, oh, how do I identify with the poet? How do I identify with the grandmother? Who has been that for me? Where are the places that sustain me and keep me going in my mind? But that part there is the immediate and primal challenge to me, and I think that’s an important thing, in terms of the ethics of reading. To some extent I’m hopeful things will change, but racism is a system that keeps propagating itself. It wasn’t the bankers, millionaires or computer magnates we turned to in the crisis – it was the nurses, garbage cleaners, supermarket workers; I hope those people will be valued more. In the book I look at the England my six-year-old son is growing up in – I hope it will get better. My son is still alive because a West Indian nurse called Grace valued his body and paid him attention when he was born prematurely [explored in the moving poem Grace].I see the word “concealed” there, and I think of headlines where, in London, there might be references to young people of color carrying a concealed weapon. And I think he is deliberately taking this idea of concealed and talking about what do you conceal because other people will deny it and threaten you, other powers will, and people who say that they’re the law-keepers and threaten you with being perceived as the law-breaker. And I think, ultimately, he’s saying that your paradise is a quality of life; but, deeper than that, it’s your life. In a recent interview with the Guardian, the British-Trinidadian Roger Robinson conjectured that his poetry‘came out of [his mother’s] storytelling at the dinner table’. The truth of this resounds through A Portable Paradise, the winner of the 2019 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Robinson’s voice is remarkable for its attentiveness to the daily subtleties of life – though his collection may seem ambitious in covering the Grenfell Tower disaster, the theorist Stuart Hall, Windrush, Bob Marley, the Brixton riots and the premature birth of his own son, Robinson displays a telescopic power of observation which cuts through the detritus that complex political subjects can accumulate. What he presents is a faithful vision of distinct realities, tracing the Grenfell disaster to‘Muhammed’s fridge’, drawing powerful irony from a slave’s‘cotton shirt’, dissecting mundanities – there is a line in the bitter Citizen Iwhich reads‘Every second street name is a shout out to my captors’.

This poem isn’t sentimental. This poem is saying, here is what it’s like to hold a paradise, when you know you live in a reality that people would want to steal your paradise, steal your life. The notion of the paradise evokes sensory memories of a distant land, possibly Robinson’s own home country, Trinidad, with references to ‘white sand’, ‘green hills’ and ‘fresh fish’. The poem ends on a cautiously optimistic note, the paradise offering ‘fresh hope’ and the ‘morning’ connoting a new start. A Portable Paradise Context Memory and belonging: the poet speaks of a ‘grandmother’ in the past tense and in the same breath speaks of ‘Paradise’, which suggests that both are in the speaker’s memory and are interwoven. Identity: the speaker has a clear and deeply personal connection to his idea of paradise, which has become part of his identity. A recurring theme throughout the collection is of paradise. Four of the five sections are bookended by poems that riff off explorations and questions of paradise. Is paradise a reward for a good life, or is it something you devotedly nurture as you go about this life?I’ve recently read Leviathan, [Philip Hoare’s book] about an obsession with whales; it’s amazing. Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is next. Petit, who conducted meetings with her fellow judges Evie Wyld and Peter Frankopan on Zoom, added: “Every poem surprises with its imagery, emotional intensity and lyric power, whether dealing with Grenfell, Windrush or a son’s difficult birth, which is also a tribute to a Jamaican nurse,” said Petit, referring to Robinson’s poem Grace, named after the nurse who cradled his son in neonatal intensive care. Jacob Ross is an amazing writer and he hasn’t had the recognition he deserves. I also admire Bernardine Evaristo and how she can trudge for 40 years not getting the recognition she deserved and then win the top slot. I’m interested in people who think what they’re writing is important and, despite not getting recognition, continue.

Tuama: One of the complexities of literature is the way within which literature invites people to identify with a point of view and with a character in it. And it’s so easy to want to be brought into the point of view of the speaker here, or the grandmother. And I think that there is always a literary and moral and ethical challenge, certainly, for me, is to find myself in at that line, “That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.” When have I been the “they”? When have I looked on somebody else and thought, “Oh, I want that,” and I might have denied that I’m stealing it, but I’m stealing it anyway. And so the literary invitation for me is to think about that line and how that line has impacted me, and how I have been the demonstration of the impact of that line. It is a diverse list – we hope for that, we didn’t plan it – as well as being diverse in terms of subject and craft. If you were choosing 10 books to build a poet’s education, these would be a good choice,” he said. Writing is very solitary and I like the camaraderie of music. I love the world of sounds. In this book I definitely thought about the music of poems more than ever. A Portable Paradise, Robinson’s fourth poetry collection, mixes pop culture, history, nature, mythology, art and socio-political commentary to illustrate the suffering of contemporary living. A co-founder of both the Spike Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Kitchen, he is one of the key mentors and influencer of many of the most productive and admired poets and writers working in the UK today, such as Inua Ellams and Johny Pitts.

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You’re a vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound – what are the different pleasures of poetry versus music? These are finely crafted poems, that reveal Roger Robinson’s capacity to tell involving stories and capture the essence of a character in a few words, to move the emotions with the force of verbal expression, and engage our thoughts, as in the sequence of poems that reflect on just what paradise might be. A Portable Paradise is a feast to be carried by lovers of poetry wherever they go. Robinson’s most recent collection is deeply thought-provoking and utterly necessary. Throughout, he displays a level of technical virtuosity few other poets writing today can match. Robinson’s collection beat titles including Elif Shafak’s Booker-shortlisted novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, and Robert Macfarlane’s exploration of the world beneath our feet, Underland. I first came across Roger Robinson in the middle of the pandemic, after he won the TS Eliot prize for his new collection of poems A Portable Paradise.