A Portable Paradise

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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. Prize judge and poet Pascale Petit, who is the only other writer to win the Ondaatje for a poetry collection, called A Portable Paradise a “healing” and “profoundly moving book [that] manages to balance anger and love, rage and craft”.

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. 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. 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.

Join us as we deconstruct the AQA Worlds and Lives poetry at GCSE level. This A Portable Paradise poem analysis takes the spotlight today, with the following explorations:

The book is a long reflection on paradise. And the word is such an interesting word, “paradise.” It comes into Latin and Greek, and English, through an early Iranian language, Avestan, which is the language of the scriptures, of Zoroastrianism. And it means “an enclosed garden”. And so, I suppose often, in English, you think of paradise, speaking of the garden of paradise, Eden. And John Milton’s epic poem called Paradise Lost is about Adam and Eve losing, or being expelled from, Eden. Or people might think about paradise as heaven, as well. Robinson gets you thinking about those questions deeply. The only paradise-free section looks at the Windrush Scandal as a paradise lost as those wrongs can never be put right.

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.

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. The poet John Burnside, chair of the judges, praised A Portable Paradise for “finding in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of ‘sweet, sweet life’.” 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. Personal triumph: there are repeated references to ‘stresses’ and other forms of adversity that must be overcome. Does this mean paradise is our reward or our safe haven from the trials and tribulations of everyday life?Identity: the speaker has a clear and deeply personal connection to his idea of paradise, which has become part of his identity.

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. 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’). 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 He said the judges had made passionate cases for various books for months, but Robinson was the unanimous choice in their final meeting on Monday. 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.

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Your poem Beware in A Portable Paradise feels horribly resonant after George Floyd’s murder (“When police place knees/at your throat, you may not live/to tell of choking”). 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’. 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? Tuama: I think this poem invites people who have lived under a sustained threat to imagine what has sustained them through living through that threat and whose voices in their ancestors and their matriarchs have given them ways to hold onto something that keeps them alive, as well as then maintain the focus to know that it isn’t your fault, that there is something out to steal, there is a “they” out to steal what’s going on; and from that, then, to keep that in your mind, too — to be aware that you’re in the struggle. And I think, other people who haven’t lived under sustained torture and sustained stealing, and people who have lived in systems that have benefited them, rather than bereaved them, I think the invitation here is to pay attention to, when have I been the person who, whether I admit it or not, has been out to steal the paradises that keep people alive? 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.