A Portable Paradise

A Portable Paradise puts Grenfell at its heart. The tower fire of 2017 is among the collection's central subjects, treated with documentary force, and that treatment announces the book's method: British catastrophe examined at the level of individual bodies, with formal invention doing the work of anger. From Grenfell the book widens into the Black British experience Robinson has lived and witnessed, the Windrush generation's betrayals, everyday and institutional racism, and the long inheritance behind them, stared at unflinchingly, in poems that read history down to single bodies and single rooms. And then, against all of it, the book keeps producing tenderness: Grace, one of its most loved poems, celebrates the nurse who cared for Robinson's premature son, born weighing scarcely a kilogram, and the closing title poem hands over the grandmother's advice that gives the collection its name and its politics, to carry paradise hidden on your person, portable, so that no one who empties your pockets can take it. Robinson, born in Hackney, taken to Trinidad at four, and back in Britain in the 1980s, a British resident with a Trini sensibility and the vocalist of King Midas Sound, had built his reputation across music and performance; this book made him central to British poetry overnight. The judges chose it unanimously, with chair John Burnside finding in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of sweet, sweet life, and the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize, which made him the prize's second Caribbean heritage winner after Derek Walcott, was followed by the RSL Ondaatje Prize.