Home & Place
Home & Place
What makes somewhere “home”? Is it where you were born, where you live now, or a feeling you carry inside? Three contemporary poems in the Belonging anthology explore these questions: Amy Blakemore’s “Peckham Rye Lane,” Imtiaz Dharker’s “In Wales, Wanting to be Italian” and Zaffar Kunial’s “Us.” Each poem presents home as something more complicated than a single place on a map.
“Peckham Rye Lane” — Amy Blakemore
Amy Blakemore is a contemporary British poet. Her poem takes a specific London street — Rye Lane in Peckham, south-east London — and transforms it into a celebration of urban belonging. Peckham is one of London’s most diverse neighbourhoods, and the poem captures the sights, sounds, smells and textures of a multicultural high street.
Blakemore uses accumulation — piling up sensory details one after another — to convey the density and vitality of the street. The effect is immersive: the reader feels as though they are walking through Peckham, surrounded by different languages, foods and cultures. This technique suggests that belonging in a modern city is not about a single culture or tradition, but about the fusion of many.
Blakemore presents belonging as something found in the everyday — a busy street, a market, the sounds of overlapping languages. Her Peckham is not glamorous or poetic in a traditional sense, but it is alive with human connection. The poem challenges the idea that belonging requires a deep ancestral tie to a place; instead, it can be built through shared daily life.
“In Wales, Wanting to be Italian” — Imtiaz Dharker
Imtiaz Dharker (born 1954) was born in Pakistan, raised in Glasgow and has lived in India and Wales. Her poem’s title immediately signals hybrid identity: the speaker is physically in Wales but imaginatively drawn to Italy. This creates a layered sense of place — the speaker does not belong fully to any single location.
Dharker uses humour and self-awareness to explore the absurdity of wanting to belong somewhere you have no connection to. The poem suggests that belonging is partly a matter of desire and imagination, not just geography or heritage. The speaker’s longing for Italy — its warmth, food, expressiveness — says as much about what she finds lacking in her current location as it does about Italy itself.
Dharker has described herself as a “cultural mongrel” — someone who belongs everywhere and nowhere. Her AO3 context is rich: born in Lahore, raised in Scotland, married in India, living in Wales. This poem reflects her wider body of work, which consistently questions fixed national identity. For Dharker, home is not a place you are from but a space you create through relationships, language and imagination.
“Us” — Zaffar Kunial
Zaffar Kunial (born 1981) is a British poet of Kashmiri-English heritage. “Us” is a poem that explores the meaning of the pronoun itself — who is included in “us” and who is excluded? Kunial plays with language to examine how words shape belonging. The poem uses ambiguity and wordplay to show that identity and belonging are never fixed.
Kunial builds the poem from everyday uses of one word. He remembers that in the Midlands “us equally meant me,” and he hears football supporters ride “the Mexican wave of we or us.” The word is warm and inclusive, yet the speaker also feels “separations of us.” By placing this single word under a microscope, Kunial reveals how language itself can create belonging or exclusion. Kunial is the son of an English mother and a Kashmiri father, and his wider work sits between cultures. In “Us” the borderland he makes visible is the one inside English itself.
Kunial makes language the subject of the poem. The word “us” is simultaneously a term of warmth (family, community) and a term of division (us versus them). This dual meaning mirrors Kunial’s experience of hybrid identity — belonging to both English and Kashmiri cultures, yet sometimes feeling fully at home in neither.
Comparing the Three Poems
What “home” means: For Blakemore, home is a specific, physical place — Peckham Rye Lane, with its noise and diversity. For Dharker, home is something imagined and desired, not necessarily where you are. For Kunial, home is embedded in language itself — the word “us” contains both belonging and its opposite.
Blakemore’s tone is exuberant and sensory — she delights in the richness of Peckham. Dharker is wry and self-deprecating, finding humour in her own displacement. Kunial is quieter and more philosophical, turning a single pronoun over and over to find its hidden meanings. All three poems present belonging as complex rather than straightforward, but their emotional registers are very different. This tonal contrast is a strong AO2 comparison point.
Form: Blakemore’s accumulative structure mirrors the crowded street. Dharker’s conversational, self-aware style reflects her fluid sense of identity. Kunial’s tight, compressed lines reflect the intensity of examining a single word. In each case, form and content are inseparable — the way the poem looks on the page reinforces what it says about belonging.
Context (AO3): All three poets write from a contemporary British perspective, but with different cultural backgrounds. Blakemore celebrates the multicultural reality of modern London. Dharker draws on a life lived across multiple countries. Kunial inhabits the linguistic space between two cultures. Together, these poems show that “home” in twenty-first-century Britain is not a single, fixed idea.