Wright, Kit
WRIGHT, Kit
Nationality: British. Born: Kent in 1944. Education: Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire; New College, Oxford. Career: Teacher in a comprehensive school, London; lecturer in English, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, 3 years. Education secretary, Poetry Society, London, 1970–75; fellow-commoner in creative arts, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1977–79. Awards: Geoffrey Faber memorial prize, 1978; Poetry Society Alice Hunt Bartlett prize, 1978; Arts Council bursary, 1985. Address: c/o Viking Kestrel, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England.
Publications
Poetry
Treble Poets 1, with Stephen Miller and Elizabeth Maslen. London, Chatto and Windus, 1974.
The Bear Looked over the Mountain. London, Salamander Imprint, 1977.
Bump-Starting the Hearse. London, Hutchinson, 1983.
From the Day Room. Liverpool, Windows Press, 1983.
Real Rags and Red. London, Century Hutchinson, 1988.
Poems 1974–1983. London, Century Hutchinson, 1988.
Short Afternoons. London, Century Hutchinson, 1989.
Poetry (for children)
Arthur's Father [Granny, Sister, Uncle]. London, Methuen, 4 vols., 1978.
Rabbiting On and Other Poems. London, Fontana, 1978.
Hot Dog and Other Poems. London, Kestrel, 1981.
Professor Potts Meets the Animals of Africa. London, Watts, 1981.
Cat among the Pigeons. London, Viking Kestrel, 1987.
Tigerella. London, Scholastic Childen's Books, 1993.
Dolphinella. London, Deutsch Children's Books, 1995.
Other (for children)
Great Snakes! London, Viking, 1994.
Editor, Soundings: A Selection of Poems for Speaking Aloud. London, Heinemann, 1975.
Editor, Poems for 9-Year-Olds and Under. London, Kestrel, 1984.
Editor, Poems for Over 10-Year-Olds. London, Viking Kestrel, 1984.
Editor, Funnybunch: A New Puffin Book of Funny Verse. London, Viking, 1993.
*Critical Studies: In Poetry Review, 85(1), spring 1995; by Robert Potts, in Times Literary Supplement (London), 4814, 1995.
* * *Rumor has it that Kit Wright writes lyrics for musical reviews and the like, and I can well believe it. Many of his poems have that breezily rhythmical, easily rhyming quality that shouts out for a catchy tune. Sometimes he even provides a chorus or two:
She's got
Red boots on, she's got
Red boots on,
Kicking up the winter
Till the winter is gone.
What is certain is that there is more to it than this, and if Wright's rhythms and rhymes have literary forebears, then one must be Auden. The echoes are present:
Coming out of nowhere,
Into nowhere sped,
Blind as time, my darling,
Blind nothing in its head.
What are Wright's own are his wit, his insights into our urban life, and the refreshing contemporaneity of his language. The language does not eschew transatlantic overtones, while at the same time making sure that it is the genuine article and not the language that never was of the popular entertainer.
I light the last one from the pack. Outside
An evening of wind and rain drivels and blusters
Against my sidestreet window.
Add to all of this Wright's sense of fun and one gets sudden glimpses of a world that, however bizarre, is never far from the world we know. The poetry is sometimes brittlely bright, as in "Humpty's Fatalism"—"I was a tough old egg / Philip Marlow / hanging in / sunny side up"—but at other times it gets its effects by contrasting the language used and the theme expressed—"I was thinking about her all the way from Troy / (I slipped town when the Greek Horse showed)." But the poems are never far from pushing at the nerve of real feeling, as in "Elizabeth" or "What were you going to say":
What were you going to say
On the path above the sea
When we stared down at the bay
And suddenly
The film of the bright day
Snapped at the end of a reel.
It is certainly this facility, together with his lively inventiveness, that makes Wright's collections of verse for young people so deservedly popular.
These qualities are even more apparent in Wright's second collection, Bump-Starting the Hearse. There are, of course, the wildly and hilariously scurrilous pieces such as "Underneath the Archers" ("Everyone's on about Walter's willy / Down at The Bull tonight"). But alongside are poems such as "The Day Room," about a mental hospital, and "The Specialist":
Imagine you dreamed this
stone-cold dream
and woke and the whole cold
thing were true
Such poems induce those shudders that used to be described as "some one walking over your grave."
A "light verse master" is how Peter Porter has described Wright, and so he is. But while his poetry amuses and entertains, it also disturbs, making us look at the commonplace with fresh insight and sharpness of feeling even when it is at its most self-deprecating.
In his 1989 collection Short Afternoons the serious concerns and the darker side of Wright's work are more to the fore. The remarkable facility to rhyme is still present—"Garter"/"Charter"/"Sparta"; "skyline"/"by-line"; "listening"/"glistening"—but this must not lull the reader into the idea that it heralds light verse. There are, of course, still splendidly bawdy pieces, like "Star and Garter," but alongside are deeply moving and concerned pieces such as "A Pastoral Disappointment" and "Unlikely Obbligato of Andersontown." In his mixture of the scurrilous, light, and seriously sympathetic Wright shows a healthy, Shakespearean disregard for Aristotle's unities.
Wright is also a considerable poet for young people. His poems for children are an integral part of his work and should not be overlooked. He is one of that honorable company who have not descended to the patronizing Christmas cracker and music hall jokes that others pass off as verse. The rhyming and rhythm are as carefully and properly crafted as in his poems for adults, which accounts for their popular appeal. In this respect "Zoe's Ear-Rings" is a tour de force, while the earlier poem "A Visit to the Aquarium" begins with a superb evocation of eelishness that is the stuff of real poetry.