Jug Band Jag

by Kit Wright

Overview

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780377636
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	12/16/2025
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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 Universityin 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.

Editorial 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 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

From the Publisher