When poet and scholar Jason Allen-Paisant walks through the dense, leafy expanse of Roundhay Park in Leeds, he carries more than just the quiet observation of a nature lover. He carries the red bauxite soil of Coffee Grove, Jamaica, the echoes of Oxford libraries, and the long, unquiet shadow of European history. In contemporary poetry, Allen-Paisant has established himself as a vital force—a writer who looks at a forest or a classic literary text and asks who is permitted to belong within it.
Allen-Paisant’s poetic style is defined by a decolonial ecopoetics—a radical re-imagining of nature writing. For centuries, the Western pastoral tradition treated nature as a space of solitary leisure, aesthetic beauty, and spiritual renewal for the privileged wanderer. Allen-Paisant destabilizes this tradition by placing the Black, immigrant body squarely into the landscape.
In his poems, walking through an English wood is rarely an uncomplicated stroll; it is shadowed by memories of property, colonial surveillance, and implicit racial codes. His lineation reflects this complexity. Writing often in open, unpunctuated stanzas, his lines move with the natural cadence of thought and breath, shifting effortlessly between Jamaican Patois, English, French, Italian, and German. The result is a style both intimate and expansive, binding personal memory to global histories of migration and empire.
His debut collection, Thinking with Trees, published by Carcanet Press in 2021, received immediate critical acclaim, winning the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry. The book interrogates what it means to commune with nature when one’s ancestral history is tied to the land through forced labor rather than leisure.
In 2023, Allen-Paisant published his second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello. Here, he uses Shakespeare’s Moorish general as both a mirror and a lens to explore Black masculinity, immigrant identity, and alienation across modern European cities like London, Paris, Venice, and Oxford. The collection achieved a rare double victory, winning both the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2023.
The T. S. Eliot Prize judging panel—chaired by Paul Muldoon alongside Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul—hailed the book as "a book with large ambitions that are met with great imaginative capacity, freshness and technical flair," adding that "the poetry is delivered with theatricality and in a range of voices and registers, across geographies and eras."
To feel the cadence of Allen-Paisant's work is to see how he juxtaposes different ways of knowing the world. In "Walking with the Word 'Tree'" from Thinking with Trees, he contrasts the utilitarian relationship to nature in his Jamaican upbringing with European romanticizations of the woods:
"In Porus life was un- pastoral.
The woodland was there not for living in
going for walks or thinking.
Trees were answers to our needs
not objects of desire woodfire."
In another poem from the same collection, he directly confronts the canon of English pastoralism, re-imagining Wordsworth's famous flora through a modern Black lens:
"try to imagine daffodils
in the hands of a black family
on a black walk
in spring"
Turning to Self-Portrait as Othello, Allen-Paisant addresses the fictional Moor directly in "Ringing Othello," questioning how to give voice to an archetype shaped by Western myth-making:
"How could I resurrect you to speak,
when your burial is in no ground
that I can pilgrimage to"
And in examining the fragmented ancestral lineages left by the transatlantic slave trade, he writes:
"I call you daddy bois d'ébène
pieces of scattered wood"
For readers approaching Allen-Paisant’s body of work for the first time, the ideal starting point is "Walking with the Word 'Tree'".
This poem acts as a doorway into his broader artistic philosophy. It bridges his two geographic and psychological worlds: the district of Coffee Grove in Jamaica and the green spaces of Northern England. In "Walking with the Word 'Tree'", Allen-Paisant illustrates how his grandmother's relationship to land—where trees represented shade, crops, and fuel—clashes with the English convention of entering nature purely for aesthetic contemplation. By reading this poem first, readers gain immediate insight into how Allen-Paisant uses form, cadence, and memory to dismantle traditional nature writing and build a new vocabulary for belonging.
Behind his literary success are several compelling facts about his life in poetry. Born in 1980 and raised in rural Jamaica by his grandmother, Allen-Paisant studied at the University of the West Indies before completing a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages at Merton College, Oxford. Though he had written poetry as an undergraduate, he noted that it was during his time at Oxford that "something shifted" and he began taking verse seriously as a primary creative calling.
Today, he serves as Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, bringing scholarly engagement with thinkers like Aimé Césaire into his poetry.
Balancing his academic role while raising two young children in Leeds, Allen-Paisant describes his editing process as "kicking a can down the road." Rather than waiting for long blocks of uninterrupted time, he maintains multiple digital drafts over extended periods, adding fragments, descriptions, and philosophical notes whenever a moment opens up, allowing entire books to gradually mature.
His historic 2023 sweep of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize placed him among an elite group of contemporary poets recognized simultaneously by the UK's most prestigious literary bodies.
By grounding ecopoetics in memory, body, and historical truth, Jason Allen-Paisant has expanded the horizons of modern poetry. His work reminds us that walking through a woodland or reading a canonical text is never a passive act—it is an invitation to listen to what lies beneath the surface and claim a space within the landscape.
Backgrounder Notes
Here are key facts and concepts from the article, accompanied by brief backgrounders to provide helpful context for readers:
1. Decolonial Ecopoetics
Definition: A literary movement and theoretical approach that merges environmental poetry with postcolonial critique to challenge Eurocentric perspectives on nature. It highlights how histories of colonialism, forced migration, and racial power dynamics fundamentally shape human relationships with the land.
2. The Western Pastoral Tradition
Background: A literary lineage originating in ancient Greece and widely popularized during the European Romantic era (by figures like William Wordsworth) that idealizes rural landscapes as sites of solitary retreat, beauty, and leisure. Critics note that this tradition historically relied on the viewpoint of privileged, unburdened observers, systematically excluding the lived experiences of laborers, Indigenous people, and racialized individuals.
3. Aimé Césaire (1913–2008)
Background: A Martinican poet, politician, and philosopher who co-founded the Négritude movement, an intellectual crusade that sought to restore Black pride and counter French colonial rule. His influential anti-colonial writings serve as a major foundation for modern critical theory and decolonial literature.
4. "Bois d'ébène" (Ebony Wood)
Context: A dehumanizing French colonial idiom historically used by slave traders to commodify Black enslaved people as trade goods or raw timber. Haitian poet Jacques Roumain famously subverted the phrase in his 1945 anti-colonial poetry collection Bois-d'Ébène to symbolize racial struggle and resilience.
5. T. S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize
Background: Established in the 1990s, these are widely regarded as the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious awards for contemporary poetry. Achieving a "double win" of both awards in a single year for the same collection is an exceptionally rare distinction reserved for landmark works of poetry.
6. Red Bauxite Soil in Jamaica
Context: Bauxite—the primary raw ore used to manufacture aluminum—has been heavily mined across rural Jamaica since the mid-20th century, drastically altering the island's ecology and rural economies. Its vivid red earth serves in literature as both a symbol of Jamaican topography and a reminder of resource extraction in postcolonial nations.
