This won the TS Eliot Prize in 2019. I'm struggling with it.
There are still people who will treat a text more reverently if it's called (or looks like) poetry. Here (without the 8(!) line-breaks) is the third stanza (paragraph?) of "The Missing" - "Ten streets away, a husband tries to hold onto the feet of his floating wife. At times her force lifts him slightly off the ground, his grip slipping. He falls to his knees with just her high-heeled shoe in his hand. He shields and squints his eyes as she is backlit by the sun."
A haibun, a sonnet with assonance and irregular syllable count, and a relaxed villanelle aren't sufficient to prove technical virtuosity.
"Blame" is bland. p.26, p.30, p.31 are problematic. "Ashes to fire" is a list of notes. No surprises. "On Sade" and "... Facts about Omar" are lists too. I don't know how p.56 got in there. I was hoping for a big finish. However I wasn't impressed by p.65, p.69, p.71, p.73, p.76, p.80.
I like "Black anthurium", "Black olive" and maybe "Citizen II".
Wilfred Owen said that "the poetry is in the pity". The Windrush and Greenfell Tower poems rather depend on that reaction too. But Owen was at the front reporting events we didn't already know. And the hospital observations aren't fresh either.
The A portable paradise poem is online.
Other reviews
- Anna Farrell (perhaps my favourite from the collection is Grace)
- An analysis of Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise (Gavin Herbertson)
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