A Portable Paradise

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I like an expansive poetic form. I read widely and look at global forms. Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago are influences. I admire Linton Kwesi Johnson. Derek Walcott for his use of English form and Caribbean content. I also access so much good storytelling online; Netflix shows like Top Boy are amazing. 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 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.

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

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. 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 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.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? 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. 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. 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 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.