A poet finds paradise

Written by Amilcar Sanatan for Newsday on Sunday, January 26th, 2020

There is political urgency in Robinson’s writing: it brings visibility to marginalised people, and blasts the stories of Jamaican nurses, young Muslims and black men in England on a speakerphone. He narrows in with laser focus on the lives of ordinary people – “hoodied boys,” grandmothers who “dice goat meat and season it” and the “Bob Marley in Brixton” buying a peanut punch without a revolutionary context for his rebel music.

In A Portable Paradise, the poetry carries journalistic detail of ongoing political events and a historical consciousness that anchors the record of the contemporary.