Eliot Goes Dub

 Ignoring the harsh realities of this long, frosty January - my bank account is more than empty, an entitled Etonian perjurer is misrunning the country and we are about to crash disastrously out of Europe like soon-to-be-mangled test-dummies through a windscreen - it's bracing to hear that a distinctive new non-white voice has won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. 
     Roger Robinson, whose victorious book A Portable Paradise is published by the small independent BAME press Peepal Tree, is not only a dub poet in the tradition of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Anthony Joseph but also (as I found out from this Guardian article) the singer with no less a band than King Midas Sound, one of several bass-heavy projects produced by Kevin Martin I used to follow. Their 2019 album Solitude is worth a listen but here's a track from Waiting for You, their 2009 debut:

Poem: Onset

No bestiary contains this predator, no field guide

It beds within you, blood-tick deep

Faltering and weltschmerz are its co-morbidities;

the day-sweats, twitched strabismus its outward signs

Skinful of formication it dogs your breathing

Ails the neocortex with agrammatical malaise.

Figure it hamfisted bailiff, thug-Erinye, Jesuit-probe

exacting payback for last night’s elevation –

the blackbox salvaged from your crashed/redacted memory 

he replays in jumpy snippets to dispossess the present tense. 

No moly countermands this but trans fats, MSG

Best you convene with your co-penitents at the bar, 

for a homeopathic tincture slow-absorbed, mulling which best fits:

Two-heads-on-you, coppersmiths, wood-mouth, yammer of cats

Footnote: The last line is comprised of colloquial idioms for hangover from Ireland, Sweden, France and Germany 



                                                                    (First published in The Wolf 2017)