Overview

Lovers of Kit Wright's poetry for its range and virtuosity, deep feeling and rich humour may find his new gathering exceeds expectations.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 SSPersiaduring 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. Kit 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Kit Wright
Publisher:   Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Imprint:   Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Edition:   Paperback original
Dimensions:   Width: 13.80cm , Height: 0.70cm , Length: 21.60cm
ISBN:  

9781780377636

ISBN 10:   1780377630
Pages:   96
Publication Date:   23 October 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

1 13 Namesake 15 A Pub Wall in 1974 16 One Item or Less 19 The Art of Adolf Hitler 20 The Ambition of Joe Aiello, Or The Fifty-Nine Slugs 23 Shadoof 24 Birch 25 The Bird Itself 26 Creation Song of Westgate 35 Halfway Round the Golf Course 36 At the Walter Pater Hogroast 37 Guest House Threats 39 Dead Bullet 40 Down the Grove 42 The Spirit of Alfred Tennyson Suddenly Rounds on Ezra Pound 43 Las Cabras Son Malas 44 A Seashell Sings 45 The Forsaken Hero 46 Arrival of the Butcher’s Van in the School Drive 48 The Migraine Show 49 The Witch’s Tongue 52 Arthur Spark Steps Out in the Cause of Science 53 Gordon and Walter Press Their Suits in Vain 56 Welcome to the Expatriate Community 2 59 Slow Train 60 Torpedo Path 77 Abandoned Snooker Table 78 Bookeries 79 A Night on the Tiles 81 The Eyes of Mr Silverman 83 Rat-Rhymes for Unfamiliars 85 A Sentimental Education 86 Just Before the Ruination 87 The Gulls 88 Dancing to ‘Slough’ 89 Last Chorus 90 Caneback: A Phantasmagoria 92 St Bernard and the Blackbird 93 Drink So Much Whiskey I Stagger When I’m Sleep

Reviews

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 W.H. 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) *

Author Information

Kit Wright was born in 1944 in Crookham Hill, Kent, and has published over 25 books for adults and children. After a scholarship to Oxford, he worked as a lecturer in Canada, was education officer at the Poetry Society from 1970 to 1975, Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University in 1977-79, and subsequently a freelance writer. His poetry titles include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (Salamander, 1977), Bump-Starting the Hearse (Hutchinson, 1983), Poems 1974-1983 (Hutchinson, 1988), Short Afternoons (Hutchinson, 1989), Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (Leviathan, 2000; Faber, 2008), Ode to Didcot Power Station (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) and Jug Band Jag (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). He has won many literary awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, Hawthornden Prize, Heinemann Award and Cholmondeley Award.

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