Lovers of Kit Wright’s poetry – for its range and virtuosity, deep feeling and rich humour – may find his new gathering exceeds expectations. Jug Band Jag is a wonderfully spirited bout of poetry-making whose forms and themes are markedly diverse, while the concern for musicality is constant. Whether, that is, he is dispensing the low-down on the Gunpowder Plot, or a ghost story from the world of dry-cleaning, or a fairy tale about ox tongue; reflecting on Hitler as artist, or tracing the frustrations of a career mafioso.
He gives a detailed and moving account of the sinking of the SS Persia during the First World War, in which his own grandmother and her baby were drowned, and traces the curious history of a small Kentish coastal town. A retired classics teacher sings the rivers of hell and of course, a Deep South jug band renders the blues.
Wright’s vision of the world blends the sharply realistic with a distinctive brand of surrealism. Whatever his subject and the tune that he has found for it, these new poems are linked by the quicksilver of irony and the river of humanity that runs through them.
'Sublime… Kit Wright, one of the best poets writing in Britain today.' – Carol Ann Duffy, The Guardian
‘Much of Wright's distinctiveness comes from his delighted engagement with pre-modern forms in order to create an angle on the material… Few poets are inclined, and fewer still are able, to muster the deliberately conspicuous formal accomplishment that marks light verse at its best. Wendy Cope, and before her Gavin Ewart, Philip Larkin occasionally and WH Auden are, with Wright, among its most distinctive modern exponents.’ – Sean O’Brien, The Guardian.
‘Poets write closer to their lives than novelists, so when you follow a poet down the years you acquire a (possibly false) sense of proximity. I’ve had Hugo Williams and Kit Wright as decades-long companions. Both are witty and lyrical (and very tall), Wright more the balladeer; they are now seventyish, and the bleaknesses of age and mortality are pushing into their latest collections: Williams’s I Knew the Bride (Faber) and Wright’s Ode to Didcot Power Station (Bloodaxe). This makes them even better (and just as companionable).’ - Julian Barnes, TLS Books of the Year
‘Wright may sometimes be described as a poet of “light” subjects but he isn’t to be taken lightly… The whole collection is Wright in full flight, full of puns, bullseye bombast and outrageous but never gratuitous rhymes… Everywhere the quotidian… is transformed by his wicked mastery of form’ - Richard Mabey, New Statesman, on Ode to Didcot Power Station
‘Kit Wright’s work is a bracing reminder that rhythm is a limitless resource of language, and that poetry need not sacrifice verbal subtleties to raise its voice in song. Speakable and readable, his new collection ranges from the manic mock heroics of the title poem, “Ode to Didcot Power Station”, to the descriptive intimacies of the sequence “Talking to the Weeds”.’ – Carol Rumens, on her Guardian Poem of the week.
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