In lieu of a review of Roger Robinson (2019) A Portable Paradise Leeds, Peepal Tree Press Ltd.
I read this following a recommendation by a fellow tweeter and after it had won the T.S. Eliot Prize for 2019. I had neglected it because I was so in love with the work at Jay Bernard. However, such a setting up of poets to contest inside oneself barely merits consideration – it trivialises, whatever its intention.
Now having read the collection I could see immediately why a jury would think it merited a prize. It clearly does. It is written in 4 sections with the topics being (very roughly speaking):
- Poems on Grenfell Tower and what it means;
- Poems on artists of different kinds and the motivations for writing;
- On slavery and its legacy in contemporary lives, and;
- On love, parting, break-up, moving on & what seem to be more miscellaneous poems.
The categories here are mine not his and worth very little being based on a first quick reading. However, they helped me to organise my reflection on the poems. I don’t though speak of that reflection here at all.
The poems in sections 1 and 3 stand out for me most . The poem Day Moon: For Black Men’s Walking group who walk in the Yorkshire Dales being one that stuck because it was a poem about how racism is (almost) compensated for. It’s a dream of sustained self-fulfilment preserved like a rock, even if only a moment of vision languishing in luxurious release from the world:
Next week we’ll see the heathers bloom.
Like us, some may forget to thrive
until, watched by this full-day moon,
like ancient rocks lying where they please,
we’re couched by this soft earth and these dry weeds.
Day Moon: For Black Men’s Walking group who walk in the Yorkshire Dales
But with poetry of this quality words fail me and the attempt to precis marks its own inadequacy next to the simultaneously rich AND sparse lines themselves.
But what intrigued, especially in poems which together open many windows to the term ‘Paradise’ – to its loss and reflective recall – although not yet gain.
To try and raise thoughts in me – and perhaps hopefully from others I have placed the poems together in a grid below.
There is surely a point to this attention to a major poet whose self-belief in his creative talent made him compare it to the origination of the universe and proclaim its meaning as God’s plan for ‘men’ (sic.).
Robinson’s poem ends on the hubris of a great writer’s self-belief – being the fan of a yet unproven power in the verses to come. I don’t know yet how to read that, but there seems an entirely believable point that, even on only very thin evidence, a poet must be ‘a fan of himself’. It is the only way to create. There is no identification of Robinson with Milton but there is a statement of the grounds that even unpublished poets must have in their own powers.
Robinson’s Milton makes ‘assertions of his undeniable talent’ before he in Paradise Lost Book 1:25 will ‘assert Eternal Providence’ to man. Milton’s lines conflate the long duration of the Spirit of God waiting from even its own origin with the shorter but felt long duration of Milton’s self-preparation as a poet.
I suspect that Milton’s ability to conflate his creativity with that of God, an almost Satanic hubris, is totally believed by Robinson. Like the Republican Milton, he will stand up for the freedom of a Milton to:
… rewrite everything – history, (10)
Culture, religion – everything was ripe
For his reinterpretation.
On Milton
Because the rest of the poems in A Portable Paradise are surely about a time – here, now, around Grenfell in Westminster, in the Yorkshire Dales, on the streets where young black men are imprisoned in ways that reflect slavery-inherited power relations, ‘everything (is now) ripe’ for reinterpretation and a belief in a future that can be hung on our walls.
At the end of Section 3 is a poem about reflecting on your grandfather that traverses horse racing to get to ideas of revolution and independence. What is independence? I don’t know but:
… if I speak of independence
I’m speaking about Paradise
And if I speak of Paradise …
The Job Of Paradise
And thus the poem ends, with a dream of freedom from ‘slavery’ that persists in feeling and thought to a Paradise so lost we can’t find its blueprint, but in which we have to believe, lest like Toni Morrison we stay over-obsessed by the padlocks to ‘Paradise’, in her version of that (On Toni Morrison). And yet – all one of these poems can say to young black men is to ‘Keep alive’ rather than be waylaid by the acknowledged ‘racism and disrespect’ of white society (The Darkening Red of your Blood).
I need not tell you that these poems are not speaking to me and perhaps they don’t intend you. As he says of Toni Morrison:
Even though white people buy
her books she is not talking
to them. She is talking to herself
and she is black.
On Toni Morrison
Anyone like to join in and put me right on all this. It is great poetry. It isn’t therefore transparent, even the clarity of its language use.
Steve
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