At Home from Home: A Poet’s Experience of Country and Migration
At Home from Home: A Poet’s Experience of Country and Migration

Summary/Abstract: In this lecture I want to explore, by reading seven of my own poems, different ways of using the writing of poetry to help feel at home in the world. The premise of such work must be that the writer has already felt somehow not at home, that the surroundings are under-responsive – for reasons which may be psychological, but may also involve some condition or history of the place itself, and, of course, both individual response, and what it is a response to, simultaneously; and the promise of such work is that the writing and reading of the poem will aid the responsiveness of the surroundings by finding them attributed with warmth through their evocation. I will be particularly interested in threedistinct experiences of home connected to my own migratory transits, and will look at a poem or two on each of these three states, all of which experiences are familiar in the current condition of the intensely migratory world in which we live, one where the phrase ‘migrant crisis’ equivocates painfully between it being a crisis for the countries to which the migrants come, and one for the migrants themselves. My three distinct experiences are (1) the attempt to feel at home in a primal landscape that has failed, for reasons I explore, to sustain a secured sense of belonging; (2) the attempt to feel at home in a place to which you have migrated, but where you are treated by definition as a foreigner or alien; and (3) the attempt to feel at home in a place where you are assumed or taken to be at home, but where you continue, for different reasons, to feel isolated and displaced. In each case I will read the poem and talk about its inspiration in the light of these themes, drawing attention insofar as I can to features of their making that indicate both the premise and the promise outlined above.

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