Some Sacred Harbour

Some Sacred Harbour: New and Selected Poems

Roger Robinson

Bloomsbury Poetry, 2026

The poet’s wife notices there is a Black man in an eighteenth century painting they’re looking at. The artist has made him a small smudge in the background as he serves illuminated, wealthy white people in the foreground of the picture. You can scarcely see him.

Only when the light catches the gloss
on his painted skin
at a specific angle,
he waits for the right conditions
to be seen

‘The Music Lesson’

Art and life imitate one another across the centuries as in the present, the poet’s wife is ignored by white staff in the museum café. ‘The Music Lesson’ is a recent poem by Roger Robinson in his Some Sacred Harbour: New and Selected Poems, published this autumn, which completely floored me.

This seemingly slim volume packs a mighty punch from a poet who has devoted his literary career to reversing background and foreground, revealing and reimagining those marginalised in the canon, placing centre stage those once enslaved or in servitude and people still labouring in homes, factories, hospitals to this day.

It is a very big book, spanning decades of Roger Robinson’s writing. Poems from four other collections: Home is Not a Place (his collaboration with photographer Johny Pitts); A Portable Paradise, which won him many accolades including the TS Eliot Prize and Ondaatje Prize; The Butterfly Hotel; and his poems in the Hurvin Anderson monograph are also included. (This reviewer is thrilled that he and his Polish translator Bartosz Wójcik were shortlisted for the European Poet of Freedom Literary Award this year.) The book ends with his poetic essay ‘Some Sacred Harbour’. I won’t say more about that to avoid spoilers, but it proved a delicious and surprising ending and immediately made me go back to the beginning to read everything again. So save it for last!

The collection spans the here and elsewhere, moving between worlds, between British and Trinidadian culture. In ‘The Quality of Light’, a Saint Lucian and a Nigerian discuss ‘Whether you describe the specific/light of where you’re from or the certain light/of where you live’, providing what could be an ars poetica for his work. Roger Robinson refuses to choose either option, easily managing both. Mostly, he has resisted his mother’s advice to become a preacher, preferring to ‘remain a questioning man’ (‘Preaching’).

A consummate story-teller with both simplicity and elegance, Roger Robinson’s poems take us through a gamut of emotions, from anger to exuberance. There is plenty to feel angry about. Along with colonialism and racism, he addresses the current hostile environment created by politicians that has targeted Black people such as the Windrush generation. He responds to public events as well as homing in on details of everyday life, combining the individual and collective experience. His poems move from plain speaking such as ‘Interview’ or the rage of his ‘Citizen’ sequence to the tender and lyrical. ‘The Missing’ is his devastating, beautiful elegy for the victims of Grenfell:

The Risen stream slowly, so slowly
out the gothic doors
and up to the sky, finches darting
deftly between them.

‘Taxidermy’ tells the shocking story of a slaver who kept the severed hand of his servant-slave ‘in this act of preserved mutilation’. Nowadays, even enjoying a swim, the poet has to deal with potential threats from white people (‘In Olney River’).

How in the face of vicious – baffling – oppression is it possible to thrive? Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X have an imaginary conversation on this very question in ‘Luminaries’: ‘Are we so attuned to pain that we feel/strange when we escape it?’ The answers lie in the ‘portable paradise’, which Roger Robinson’s grandmother urged him to carry in everyday moments of connection and community.

This is as much a book of joy as of anger. Since he is also a musician, it’s not surprising music weaves through Roger Robinson’s poems, bringing joy, healing or resistance: familiar tracks while driving, ‘Aba Shanti -I Sound System’, the welcome of a blues (‘Hallway’) or basslines ‘bubbling’ as Edward Colston’s statue is pulled down (‘Soundtrack’). There is sharing food, combing a child’s hair, the camaraderie of visiting the barber, the nod of understanding between Black men, jumping in the sea (‘The City Kids See the Sea’) or a childhood memory of whittling lolly sticks (‘Shipbuilding’).

Nature is always at the heart of this book, offering solace which ‘can blank out a racist boss’ with its trails (‘Day Moon’). The natural world also provides metaphors for understanding our human selves, without romanticising them. However, sometimes we grow bitter with internalised poison like the ‘Soldat Martinique Butterfly’; othertimes we soar, sacred, despite what’s done to us (‘On Seeing The Butterfly Collection’). Landscape, coastline sustain us. When fear makes us close up, if we open our hearts we find we can co-exist, enriched (‘A Lesson from the Backyard Bees’). In the face of all the pain, Roger Robinson turns to our earthly paradises, to women planting beans or potatoes, hoping against hope: ‘In sleet and in sun/for a season that had not yet come, and might never.’ (An Ode to Wives Who Grow). This big-hearted book rouses, delights, fortifies.

Bloomsbury: Some Sacred Harbour

Maria Jastrzębska

Maria Jastrzębska is a poet, editor and translator.