In 2021, award-winning poet Roger Robinson and acclaimed photographer Johny Pitts rented a red Mini Cooper and decided to follow the coast clockwise in search of an answer to the question: What is Black Britain now in this time? Leaving London, they followed the River Thames east towards Tilbury, where the Empire Windrush docked in 1948. Too often, that is where the popular history about Black Britain begins and ends – but Robinson and Pitts continued out of London, following the coast clockwise through Margate to Land’s End, Bristol to Blackpool, Glasgow to John O’Groats and Scarborough to Southend on Sea.

Home Is Not a Place is the spectacular result of their journey.

Both a protest against social injustice & a love offering to humanity, A Portable Paradise is a striking example of the profound power of poetry, when emotional connection & mastery of craft find synchronicity. The writing reveals a desire to reach the audience in tangible, lasting ways, achieved principally through Robinsons’ ethereal imagery, which gives the reader the impression of having one foot in this life and one in another realm.

Whether read or listened to, the poems, by turn enraged & tender, are incantatory & like prayers, they generate hope. They also convey an irrepressible sense of Robinsons’ generosity of spirit, his deep love of people & a respect for the full spectrum of wonder & horror that comprises the human experience. 

Roger Robinson writes from a place somewhere between Trinidad and Brixton, an insider/outsider vantage point that leads him to see a state of alienation and unbelonging in Black British London that is perhaps no longer so visible to those who have no other world.

The very fear of loss generates a drive to recreate the remembered world in all its richness, humour and sensuality and […] Roger Robinson’s poems display a faith in a human capacity for regeneration, of shaping new concepts of home. In moving, pared-down lyrics, expansive prose poems, witty ballads and even a prayer, Roger Robinson’s poems are marked by an engagement with the sounds and rhythmic resources of language drawn from both Trinidad and Britain.

Drawing on his own three decades of experience, Roger Robinson shares his artistic practices honed throughout a lifetime of creativity to guide you through over 120 guiding principles to fuel your own creativity.

With much of the content battle-tested through years of workshops and conversations with fellow creatives, ‘On Creativity’ offers an invaluable glimpse, providing insight into the bedrock principles that sustain his enduring creative practice.

With concision and insight , Roger Robinson skillfully imparts his expertise from his multi award winning career as a poet. He walks readers through many ways to think about poems and poetry taking the most complexed of poetry ideas and simplifying them to be accessible to the intermediate writer.

On Poetry is a book of cheat codes for poets, imparting huge amounts of information in a simplified and condensed form and is an invaluable glimpse into decades of poetic thought and teaching, full of prompts, poetics, practice and principles of structure; a must-have for all lovers of poetry.