A Portable Paradise
I’ve read two outstanding books of contemporary poetry recently. Fiona Benson’s Vertigo and Ghost won the Forward Prize, but she was pipped to the T.S.Eliot Prize by Roger Robinson for A Portable Paradise (Peepal Tree Press).
The first poem in Robinson’s collection is ‘The Missing’, dedicated to ‘the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster’, and the last poem is ‘A Portable Paradise’ itself. In between hell and paradise there are poems of tremendous thematic and formal variety. It is a book I’ll keep returning to.
A few thoughts:
‘The Missing’ (p.9) is devastating. It hits you right at the start of the collection. Robinson is particularly good at endings, as here: ‘They are the city of the missing. / We, now the city of the stayed.’
‘The Father’ (p.15) is one of several prose poems. A 12 year-old girl is ‘becoming her father’ after his death in Grenfell. She ‘has taken to reading several newspapers while drinking strong cardamom-flavoured coffee.’
That kind of detail is everywhere. In ‘Windrush’ (p.27) the poet recreates the immigrants’ arrivals as they come off the ship with ‘architectural pleats in their trousers / and suitcases each containing a live lizard.’
In ‘Walk With Me’ (p.33) he walks through Brixton with a younger man, telling him about its deep past, and on the next page there is ‘Ashes to Fire’, which fizzes with brilliant detail about ‘hot nights in Brixton.’
There are several fine responses to paintings. Check out ‘A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page’ by Bartholomew Dandridge here and then read the poem (p.58): ‘I cannot leave you as a ghost’.
Beauty and hope in the final section, in the form of the lovely ‘Grace’, about a Jamaican senior nurse looking after the poet’s infant son. Another heart-breaker ending. And the title poem of the collection right at the end: ‘And if I speak of Paradise, / then I’m speaking of my grandmother /who told me to carry it always / on my person, concealed, so / no one else would know but me.’
Now for ‘The Missing’: