Finding Your Way Home: Explorations of the Journey Motif in Alan Riach’s Homecoming

Abstract

This article endeavours to explore how Alan Riach in his poetry collection Homecoming (2009) treats the motif of home as an internationalist summation which locates and bolsters Scotland’s own sense of identity, contextualised in terms of the poet’s personal understanding of his own poetic purchase on the themes of remembering, leaving, fi nding, and rediscovering home. Moreover, critical attention is paid to the way Riach’s poems forge a construct wherein a cultural agenda represents the clearest way forward for the accomplishment of Scotland’s nationalist aspirations.