I have spent a lot of time this year with Roger Robinson’s poem ‘A Portable Paradise’. Mainly because it is now up on the Tube and, when I am still required to be out of my home on some bit of legal business, it is a nice thing to read and mull over between stops.
In many ways it’s fitting for the poem to be placed on public transport, and not only because it’s the title poem of the collection that resulted in him being awarded the T.S. Eliot prize this year. Roger Robinson is a poet forever in the act of travelling.
Robinson has always worn his experience as a migrant, shuttling between London and Trinidad, on his sleeve. Memory, specifically of the Caribbean, is a continual source of solace and strength, but also melancholy. The vivid memories of the place, in everything from the smell of rum in Christmas cake to the shellac records evoking the sounds of Carnival, are the primary source of emotional thrust in his 2009 collection, Suckle.
In The Butterfly Hotel, from 2013, he draws perhaps his sharpest contrast between that childhood of colour and light and a Brixton that threatens at times to deaden every impulse until, as he puts it in ‘The Immigrant’s Lament’, ‘he has lost / his need for seasoning. /Grey is no longer / good or bad’. The butterflies of the subsequent poems are symbols of a venturesome spirit, but also of fragility, and a shiver runs through us when they are simply preserved and not able to roam. In ‘On Seeing the Butterfly Collection’, the persona considers the pinned specimens with ‘their splayed wings / telling me that they have flown’ – past tense. These butterflies no longer travel.
Hotels form a backdrop to the action of this poetry, right up the ‘hotel, / hostel or hovel’ in ‘A Portable Paradise’ where Robinson imagines his interlocutor will retreat to when they need to shelter from the world. Yet that same sense of precarity, of disaster lurking not far away and no home being entirely stable, keeps tremoring through even our moments of safety. The paradise which we must keep on our person, (‘concealed… ‘that way they can’t steal it’’), is both apparently essential and in near-constant peril.
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In the Medieval ‘peregrinus’ tradition (from which we get the English word ‘pilgrim’), the Christian life on Earth is imagined as a constant state of transition, with this life being only a station on the way to some other, more divine kind of life. One is instructed to travel light; to take only the essentials, and not be caught up in the world and its trivialities. Some hermits and monks, purportedly, would practice this to the extent of setting out with no fixed destination in mind, on foot or sometimes in a small single boat, trusting only to Providence for their safe passage.
Whatever Robinson’s own theological proclivities, his poems have no room in themselves for any kind of lasting paradise. It is always something elsewhere, remembered or recovered in snatches, and something whose primary function is ‘to comfort those who’ve been left behind’ (‘The Job of Paradise’). Roger Robinson is a poet who knows that paradise is lost to us, this side of the grave at least, but who has faith that its memory, even viewed in miniature by the light of a desk-lamp, can strengthen us – can ‘comfort’ us.
And indeed, ‘A Portable Paradise’, both the poem and the larger collection, had much in it to comfort me. But I was troubled by the poem’s last line, and the line that ends the book, where we are told to hold on to this image and ‘keep staring at it till you sleep’. Something of what that line suggested about the business of poetry itself bothered me. Was it really the best we could do, as poets, to lull the reader asleep? Robinson has himself been vocal about the intolerable societal conditions that have inspired both his own rage and the rage of generations of activists, subjects which he does not shy from in his poems. So why does it sound like we are being told that the best thing we can expect from our poets, the makers of our portable paradises, is briefly to take the edge off the pain? Can’t we build something better than that? Can’t we demand more of our leaders and our poets?
It was precisely this sense of impotence, and the “woe is me” lamentations to the universe at large, which earned a piercing critique from reviewer Marek Sullivan in Volume 110:3 of the Poetry Review from Autumn of this year. Specifically, the poem ‘Dolls’, which offers a list of matters which the persona could rearrange to stop the Grenfell Tower Fire, presents him with a problem: the poem seems as ready to blame ‘the Daily Mail’s favourite ground zero, “Muhammad’s fridge which exploded”’, as the ‘cladding that burned like dry straw’, in a way which weakens the poem’s overall impact. As Sullivan argues:
‘Robinson seems to be railing against two adversaries, the racist state and the universe, the second of which encompasses the first and cannot be beaten.’
For Sullivan, Robinson’s generalised angst is a dilution of the radical potential in these poems, and an abdication of responsibility on Robinson’s part for not writing work with ‘more … context, more depth of analysis, more consistency and more history’. He wants something which might do justice to the strength of feeling that motivated so much political action this year on behalf of black and brown people in the UK and worldwide.
Sullivan’s anxiety is one that I understand. But his view is, I think, uncharitable. I agree that those final, problematic lines of ‘Dolls’ are among the weakest in the collection, and I agree that some of the more ‘political’ poems seem oddly less impactful than those where Robinson is more attentive to the more insurmountable difficulties of time, displacement and alienation. I can well appreciate the reluctance to embrace what Emmanuel Levinas once called the ‘alibi’ of metaphysics – the need to provide us with some compensation for the fact that, although we are here, the ‘true life’, paradise, is somewhere else.
But while we are here, there are still needs to which we must minister, even if only for this moment, even if they will likely return again. There are works of mercy which may yet be done by poets, and Robinson takes this seriously. These are poems which accept that these stresses will be ‘sustained and daily’. The workaday world with its many petty injustices, its daily and insoluble aches, will always return, and for that reason the job of the poet is never done. As Robinson puts it in ‘On Nurses’, faced with the realities of a random universe where ‘death can creep up on the innocent’, there are nevertheless those who can provide solace, ‘pull spirits back from the brink… like midwives’. He could easily be speaking about poets.
The recurring medical metaphors also help to re-order and redeem a bleak reality. The poem ‘Shandilay Bush’ imagines a bitter medicinal herb, boiled and administered to a fever patient whose life is now ‘hanging by my leaves’. What could have been an intolerable cliché becomes a revived and visceral metaphor, where the harshness of the cure – and maybe the world – still drags the patient back to ‘sweet sweet life’.
Viewed through this lens Robinson’s poetry is bread for the hungry, balm for the bleeding, the heart in a heartless world. It is something we are all in need of right now, in a year that has forced most of us inside and turned our reality on its head. There is plenty of room for systemic critique of the rapacity and short-sightedness that has exacerbated much of our difficulty – as a Green I have been making my fair share of them. But it is just as important to make sure that we can see ourselves through to the next good day; to make sure we can draw on a paradise, even if it seems out of reach.
There is nothing ignoble or easy, then, about a poetry that provides this kind of consolation. There are times when I feel a need for it as deep and as urgent as for food or drink, or for any sense of a bolt-hole in the chaos that characterises much of our world. My life may be very far removed from Robinson’s in a number of respects, but as a graduate coming into my thirties and still renting, clinging on through the ravages of late capitalism, there is still much solace to be found in its account of a peripatetic life, shot through with occasional luminous moments.
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One of the soundbites on the jacket of A Portable Paradise comes from Charlie Dark, describing Robinson as ‘one of the last true poets’. This would be an alarming thing to consider if it were true, and thank goodness it isn’t; there is proof enough in this year alone thanks to collections from Inua Ellams, Rick Dove and Caleb Femi, all of which have thrilled me to read. I have written before about the experience of reading Antonia Jade King and Gboyega Odubanjo, both poets who have crafted rich mythologies out of belonging to both the African diaspora and modern Britain. Raymond Antrobus, Yomi Sode, Caroline Teague and Nick Makoha all give me the same sense of excitement. Tune in to any random moment of the Black Lit Power Hour, hosted by the effulgent Repeat Beat Poet, and you will be swept away by young talent that is definitively owning being black and British, re-shaping the literary scene as they do.
Robinson himself also features in that show, at the very beginning. Guess which poem he reads?
The final poems of A Portable Paradise, as well as being stirring hymns of praise to healthcare workers, are also pleas for the life of his baby son. It is a rare showing; the remainder of the coming generations are notable by their absence, even as ‘time is running out’ for everyone else, whether for Abdullah in need of a liver transplant (‘Liver’) or for the poet himself as he stands on a beach where ‘the waves consume you where you stand’ (‘Maracas Beach Prayer’). In that final poem, that ‘fresh hope of morning’ described by Robinson hovers on the other side of sleep, just out of reach, beyond the last page.
In his writing life, Robinson has become well known as a mentor and guide to other black British writers, including some of those rising stars just mentioned. He has spent his time admirably, nursing a coming generation of ferocious talent in black British poetry, and a group are now coming into their power who will alter the landscape definitively. But you also get the sense that he isn’t sure that he will be among them. You wonder, reading his poems, if he conceives of his role as transitionally as he seems to view much of his life, in keeping with his sense of being never quite at home. Will it be left to others to stake their claim, after he has gone before and prepared the way?
One of the last poems in the collection, ‘Noah’, imagines the Biblical survivor of the Flood, haunted by the ‘ghostly animalia’ of all those left behind, not saved, as he tends to the routine maintenance of the livestock and ‘contemplates his faith’. The poem shies away from the hoped-for moment of relief, when the flood waters recede and a new generation can populate the earth. For now, the rain keeps pouring down and it is ‘hard, hard to sleep’.
Robinson writes for those still in the boat, anxious for those who could not be saved and dealing with the hard edge of prophecy which looks to a future they may never experience. Speaking as one of those people who might be in the boat with him (one hopes), you appreciate the need for a poetry that will give you some rest while you wait till the morning, the rising sun and a rainbow in the sky.
Tim Kiely: Poetry etc. 