Of roots and concrete: the ‟endz” as Heimat in Caleb Femi's Poor

This paper makes the case for a new understanding of home in the city and for the importance of poetry in studies of place. In his collection Poor (2020), the London poet Caleb Femi writes about his ‘endz’, the former North Peckham estate, in striking pastoral, elegiac, even Romantic tones that might seem at odds with the poverty and violence his also describes. This paper — linking Martin Heidegger's ‘poetically man dwells’ with Femi's own poetic home-making and his frequent use of root metaphors — discusses the ‘endz’ as a Heimat: a place, understood as a ‘gathering fourfold’ of earth, sky, mortals and deities (Heidegger 1949), that becomes part of identity. Femi’s poetry shows the deeper, social and personal value of places that, in the globalist and capitalist city, might be razed without consideration. It highlights the slow violence of gentrification perpetrated on individual and communal identities.