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.” Following this, Clara Park held the following interview with the poet.

Clara Park (CP): You told us a lot about the repetition of the butterfly motif in your work. Could you speak more to specific ideas or objects that recur across and throughout your work and how you return (or do not return) to certain themes?

Roger Robinson (RR): Animals have entered my work in the strangest way, never planned it, but as I’m looking over my new and selected poems at the moment, I clearly take animals to be proxies of myself. I make them either angry, scared, or say weird things, or make them sympathetic. Somebody pointed it out to me, I didn’t know it myself, but there’s references to crazy crows, dogs, butterflies, horses, but I clearly have something with the animal kingdom. It wasn’t planned, but I dig it. 

CP: We got to speak a little at the end about your influences and inspirations. What are you reading now, and who were the greatest influences (literary or otherwise) that brought you into writing?

RR: Right now, I’m reading Rilke, selected poems of Rilke, translated, and Helen Vendler, a series of essays called The Given and the Made, that speaks in really interesting ways about lyric poetry. People who brought me into poetry… I would say between a writer called Kwame Dawes, who ended up being a mentor of mine, and a writer called Sharon Olds. They definitely had that voice, and saw the way I think in that voice, and it led me to get my voice. And that voice was very much simple but not simplistic, heavy on emotions and narrative and heavy on craft. 

CP: Have you been able to find home in your writing? Or have you arrived at the way to create a portable paradise?

RR: When you say find home, I’m not sure if you meant find “tribe I belong” to or feel comfortable in when writing, but I most definitely mean both. Writing people are definitely my tribe and my home. Writing was something I always had as a gift, and it’s something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life. And, on the subject of writing paradise: it was not so much a case of if I could write paradise in a new place, it’s more if I could make this new place into a paradise that I had once known. I needed to do it because I was putting down roots here and I was having a child, so I had to come to some conclusions about where I really live, and stop having the immigrant mind of living in two places but never belonging to either. And so it’s a conscious decision. And, to some extent, with A Portable Paradise, the original idea was to document how I could do it, or the process of doing it. 

CP: When your work is politicized, do you come to view what you’ve written in a new way? What is it like to see things that may have originally been written deeply personally and then reanimated in the public sphere in perhaps unexpected ways? Are there any instances that have particularly stuck with you?

RR: I think the personal is political, and everything is political, but there were a few poems that did surprise me when taken to the public sphere. Like there’s a poem I have called “Nurses,” [written when] I did not know that COVID would happen and everyone would be dependent on nurses. And nurses had a particular role to play in society at that point, and that particular poem became quite a chant for them. Along with a poem I wrote about my son being tended to by nurses. Also a lot of people quoted that poem when they were trying to raise the pay for nurses, cause they had worked so hard over COVID. It wasn’t surprising, I understand it, but I didn’t expect it.  

Cite this: Park, Clara. “Clara Park interviews Roger Robinson.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/clara-park-interviews-roger-robinson/. Accessed 12 April 2026.

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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.

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 12 April 2026.

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Gavin Herbertson

Robinson’s work has always tackled subject-matter and themes which many would consider controversial and has drawn in a diverse array of sources and influences to do so, ranging from Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott to Netflix’s Top Boy. In “Beware”, for instance, the reader is warned about the dangers of police brutality in simple, stark terms:

When police place knees
at your throat, you may not live
to tell of choking.

Written in response to the death of 20-year-old Rashan Charles, who was killed by police in East London in 2017, the haiku feels remarkably prescient in its anticipation of George Floyd’s murder in the USA in 2020. The certainty implied by its opening conjunction, the subordinating “When”, coupled with the purposefulness of the verb “place”, generates the sense that police violence is at once deliberate and inevitable. Robinson’s spoken-word roots are also detectable in the haiku’s orality. The bitter, pained assonance of the long “O” sound in “throat” and “choking”, and the harshness of the plosive alliteration in “police place”, work in tandem to reflect the violence of the act itself.

Elsewhere in A Portable Paradise, and throughout Robinson’s oeuvre more broadly, contemporary concerns are mapped onto older forms in much the same way. In “Slavery Limerick” (2019), for example, Robinson takes the form’s clichéd comic opening, “There once was a man from Nantucket”, but strips it of its humour. His “man from Nantucket” is replaced with Bill, a runaway slave, turned thief, who yells “Fuck it” as he ignores the commands of a man holding him at gunpoint. The humour is subverted by, and supplanted with, the grimness of an execution.

In “Corbeaux” (2019), by contrast, the highly technical villanelle form is employed to explore nature’s inherent cruelty. In a villanelle, two lines are intermittently repeated verbatim across the stanzas before coming together in a terminating rhyming couplet. Inspired by Ted Hughes’s animal poetry – an extract from which is affixed as an epigraph – Robinson’s poem considers the feeding practices of scavenging “corbeaux”, the Francophone Trinidadian name for black vultures. The circling nature of the villanelle form mirrors the motion of the birds, who ‘circle the clouds when something has died’ before descending to feast.

However, it is in the opening section of A Portable Paradise that we find Robinson’s most celebrated verse to date. Therein, readers encounter a series of interconnected poems which reflect on the devastation wrought by the Grenfell Tower disaster (2017; see also Ben Okri’s “Grenfell Tower: A Poem”). The first of these, “The Missing”, presents the fire in terms of religious salvation; its victims are shown ascending to heaven in an “airborne pageantry of faith” (line 36). Through this allegorical conceit, Robinson is able to demonstrate the gulf between the euphemistic manner in which the disaster was discussed by the media and the gruesome reality faced by the victims and their families. In one particularly shocking vignette, from the close of the first stanza, the reader encounters a woman rocking “back and forth” yelling, “What about me Lord, / why not me?” (lines 10–12). Allegorically, she is praying fervently, wondering why she has been left behind on Judgement Day. Non-allegorically, she is traumatised by the fire, screaming for answers, and wishing she had burned to death alongside those she loved.

Robinson’s most recent collection is deeply thought-provoking and utterly necessary. Throughout, he displays a level of technical virtuosity few other poets writing today can match.

Cite this: Herbertson, Gavin. “An analysis of Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-robinson-a-portable-paradise. Accessed 12 April 2026.

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Biography

Writing

Roger Robinson performing with King Midas Sound, Rome, 2010 (Photo: Riccardo Frabotta, CC BY-ND 2.0)

In 2001, Robinson moved from having his poetry printed in a number of influential anthologies – notably, The Fire People (ed. Lemn Sissay, 1998) and The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000) – to publishing his own debut collection of short stories, Adventures in 3D. Since then, he has published two short pamphlets of poetry, Suitcase (2004) and Suckle (2009), and two full-sized volumes of verse, The Butterfly Hotel (2013) and A Portable Paradise (2019). While the former was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, it was the latter work and the acclaim it won which ultimately cemented Robinson’s status as one of the top poets currently writing in English.

Termed ‘deep, mature, moving and inventive’ by Bernardine Evaristo, A Portable Paradise represents the culmination of the aesthetic which Robinson developed over the preceding three decades: his verse utilises a diverse range of forms, sourced from all over the world, while prioritising orality, after the manner of Spoken Word.

Structurally, Robinson divides his two full-length collections into several parts, interlinked through a unifying image. In A Portable Paradise, all five sections culminate in a poem addressing the titular theme, while, in The Butterfly Hotel, a monarch butterfly recurs throughout, its journey emblematic of the volume’s migratory theme.

In terms of content, throughout his career, Robinson has shown an unerring willingness to shine a light on even the darkest of contemporary issues. In his view, the vocation of a poet involves “translating trauma into something people can face”. For this reason, in recent years, he has written on a wide range of subjects generally considered difficult and even taboo, from the Windrush scandal to the premature birth of his son.

—Gavin Herbertson, 2021

Cite this: Herbertson, Gavin. “Roger Robinson.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/roger-robinson/. Accessed 12 April 2026.

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