Us by Zaffar Kunial (2018): the poet turns over the word 'us', from a Midlands way of saying 'me' to a football crowd, and asks whether he can belong to any 'us'.
Kunial's mixed English and Kashmiri heritage, the three-line stanzas, sea imagery and wordplay, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'If you ask me, us takes in undulations', 'maybe it's a Midlands thing', 'when I was young, us equally meant me', 'Oi, you, tell us where yer from', 'cresting the Mexican wave of we or us', 'a shore-like state, two places at once', 'my heart's sunk at separations of us', 'When it comes to us, colour me unsure', 'the waves therein are too wide for words', 'as if the universe is a matter of one stress'.
Form: seven three-line stanzas and a single closing line, in a conversational voice ('If you ask me', 'I hope you get') with heavy enjambment and caesura, and sea imagery (undulations, waves, shore, stranded) running through it.
Structure: the meanings of 'us' gathered one after another, from a Midlands way of speaking to a football crowd, to doubt and separation, and a hopeful last line.
Context: Kunial was born in Birmingham, in the Midlands, to an English mother and a Kashmiri father; the poem shares its title with his first collection, Us (2018), shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Compares well with Jamaican British (belonging to two heritages at once), In Wales, wanting to be Italian (identity and the words for a feeling) and We Refugees (who is included in 'we' and 'us').
