Roger Robinson and Malachi McIntosh, Oxford, 23 May 2024 (Photograph: Clara Park)

“As if their bodies became AIR”: Roger Robinson in Oxford, 23 May 2024

Clara Park

On 23 May 2024, the poet, writer and performer Roger Robinson gave a reading and talk at Oxford University’s St Hilda’s College entitled, “As if their bodies became AIR.” Robinson’s talk and the subsequent Q&A were moderated by Dr Malachi McIntosh, the Barbara Pym tutorial fellow at the College, a writer and critic, and a self-professed personal fan of Robinson’s writing.

Roger Robinson and Malachi McIntosh (Photograph: Clara Park)

Throughout, Robinson’s charismatic levity shone through as he flitted across the room, butterfly-like, working the crowd and reading a selection of poems from A Portable Paradise, his most recent collection, published in 2019 and the winner of the T. S. Eliot prize. His reading included “The Job of Paradise,” “Midwinter,” “The Crow Palinode,” “Grace” and “Day Moon.” Though these poems were all from the most recent collection, Robinson referenced earlier publications as well, including symbolic resonances from his 2013 The Butterfly Hotel. He also explained some of the backstory of his multimedia project with photographer and WMW author Johny Pitts, Home is Not a Place. 

Although Robinson’s work has often intervened in, and is distinctly entangled with, political issues, he insists that the craft of poetry is often politicised outside the control, or even intention, of the author. The poems in his A Portable Paradise ranged across a variety of themes, but, as he explained, were especially focused on thinking through the possibilities, impossibilities and practicalities of creating paradise in a new place. This is in contrast to The Butterfly Hotel, which emphasises the tearing in two that comes with immigration and migration. His ideas about migration from his earlier collections had transformed with the birth of his son, he said. He spoke about the subsequent necessity of putting down roots in a place that had consistently devalued “global majority bodies,” as he put it, and was hostile to the project of paradise-making for those denied dignity and body-hood. 

In the conversation, Robinson referenced both the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire and the Windrush scandal, to highlight the way in which bodies had become undone in these places that were not home. At Malachi McIntosh’s prompting, Robinson also discussed the ways that poetry might offer dignity and subjecthood to these political and politicised people through the (ironically) distinctly de-material and “air-borne” nature of poetry. As Malachi asked more about how that project and craft have changed over the years, Robinson characterised his movement from The Butterfly Hotel to A Portable Paradise as a continual effort to make a home in poetry. For Robinson, the making of poetry has been a project that intervenes in the world around him to create portable paradises. 

Robinson came back to the motif of a butterfly several times. Butterflies as images and motifs proliferate across Robinson’s new collection and also carry resonances with the work that Robinson cites as his creative and craft inspirations, not least the recurring flower motif in Louise Gluck’s collection The Wild Iris. The butterfly was also an apt metaphor to encapsulate his thoughts and presence at this event. Robinson’s poetic interests seem to be butterfly-like in their vast range and breadth (he reads widely, broadly, voraciously). His poetic practice is also committed to reconciling one identity across migrations, like a butterfly. He insists on beauty in the banal, and on the banal in the lives of people whose stories have been “under-told”, whose banalities haven’t been represented. The butterfly, for me, highlighted the wide range of poetic craft that Robinson studies, as well as forms of repeated and unrelenting migration. Ultimately, the motif underlines his dedication to using poetry to “create paradise,” to make “paradise portable,” to put down roots despite his previous expressions of rootlessness. 


Cite this: Park, Clara. “‘As if their bodies became AIR’: Roger Robinson in Oxford, 23 May 2024.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/as-if-their-bodies-became-air-roger-robinson-in-oxford/. Accessed 22 July 2024.