A Portable Paradise

Product Information

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 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. 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. Robinson was new to me before reading this collection. But from the first poem, ‘The Missing’, written for those lost in the Grenfell fire, I was smitten by his enormous and generous talent.

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. 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?His belief in mentoring was rooted in his own experience. “I have had many mentors and one of them was [Booker prize-winner and poet] Bernardine Evaristo , who said: ‘You’ve got talent but you need to hone your craft.’” By his mid 20s he knew that he wanted to be an artist, and that if he was going to succeed he would have to live frugally. “My mentors taught me that if you control your economics you can control your output.” I was told if you get less than 36 rejections don’t say it’s not working. On about my 37th attempt I got published 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.

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. 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’).Identity: the speaker has a clear and deeply personal connection to his idea of paradise, which has become part of his identity.

You’re a vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound – what are the different pleasures of poetry versus music? 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. Many of the poems are hugely affecting, whether evoked in a traditional format, short paragraphs of prose or a few lines. Some would imagine that such poems are easy to do, but the skill and graft shine through Robinson’s words. 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].

The poem is part of a much longer, complex expansive form but also functions as a self-contained stand-alone entry. The use of caesura and enjambment provides its loose, conversational feel and the starting conjunction ‘And’ draws us as readers into the speaker’s confidence. Themes 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. 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”. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.Joining a prestigious list of previous winners, including Don Paterson, Ted Hughes, Ocean Vuong and Carol Ann Duffy, Robinson will also be just the second poet inducted into the new TS Eliot prize winners’ archive, which was established last year to preserve the voices of winning poets online for posterity. A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson 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.