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In "Blemish", Kit Wright quotes 19th-century visitors who came to Tintern Abbey with preoccupations rather different from Wordsworth:
- Ode to Didcot Power Station
- by Kit Wright
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"To them the mise en scene was not quite perfect, /For beggars buggered up the picturesque, / And the rhapsodising walkers/ Felt the peasants and their porkers / Were regrettably less gothic than grotesque."
The poem's investment in form is crucial: the jaunty cinquain in itself damns the would-be aesthetes, and by inference, Aga-fetishists discomfited by rural stench today. Much of Wright's distinctiveness comes from his delighted engagement with pre-modern forms in order to create an angle on the material. In an earlier poem, "A Clubman's 'Ozymandias'", a boozy philistine summarises Shelley's poem for an audience of the similarly small-minded and concludes: "I mean to say, what rot!"
Continuing this practice in this book, which marked his 70th birthday, Wright takes the normally saturnine Dr Johnson's famous remark about what he would like to do if he had no pressing work – ride up and down in a carriage with a pretty woman all day – and weaves it into a comic song that might have been written by 19th-century light versifiers such as Calverley or Praed:
"Blithely in a post-chaise / We'd go lilting on our way, / All sorrow and all guilt would be undone… / And with a pretty woman / My companion for the day, / Felicity would light me like the sun!"
Hard to say what Johnson would have made of such light-minded successors.
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. Auden's singable songs seem to have meant as much to him as more apparently serious pieces, and a major poem such as "The Fall of Rome" depends on a light-verse brio and cleverness. Much of this formal energy appears to have moved over into song-lyrics during the 20th century. Johnny Mercer's "Too Marvellous for Words" would distinguish any anthology:
"You're much too much / And far too very-very / To ever be / In Webster's Dictionary."
In comparison with Wright and his predecessors, contemporary performance poetry can often sound thin and underachieved and too little interested in its own medium.
Like another great light-verse poet, Edward Lear, Wright also has a melancholy aspect. An early poem, "The Adam Ward Lament", which incorporates a blues refrain, opens:
"In the Adam Ward of West Hammersmith Hospital, / Hoping I hadn't contracted the pox, / With six Hell's Angels I sat in the waiting room, / Rowdy and nervous, our minds on our cocks."
Pre-Aids, it seemed like an embarrassing inconvenience, but the poem plunges into a vision of Victorian sailors with rotted syphilitic noses in the days before a cure, and of contemporary guilt at emotional carelessness, "Angels of hell, baby / Angels of hell."
Cricket, a subject close to Wright's heart, is also close to madness and death: Dr Tyerley, who worked in a Victorian asylum, believed the game to be therapeutic for his patients, one of whom, dropped from the team and tied to a tree, comments: "I'm a wide." In this book, "Littlebredy" records how
"the white-robed cricketers / Had made their way down into the valley / To do their dance of stillness, / To do their courtly dance of almost stillness, / Dancing upon their graves before they died."
Wright is also aware that the elegiac mode, though immensely appealing to the English imagination, sometimes invokes a less wholly respectful impulse, as in "A Man of Mynton":
"Widely regarded / As Mynton Parish Church's / Most talented sideman / Of the post-war period, / Eric Arthur Upton / Has handed in his plate. / Sombre and scrotal now / Hangs his collection bag, / Dark in the Vestry / In abandoned state."
"The Spiritus Loci Has Provided Vers Noir in Your Room" is archly traditional in form but as interactive as a sinister app. One can imagine a perverse secular ministry which would leave a copy folded inside Gideon Bibles everywhere for consultation in the watches of the night:
"The poisoned heart of this hotel, / So shrewd and dark and small, / I knew particularly well / For I co-wrote them all: / The crisis in the corridor, / The body on the store-room floor, / The outrage in the hall."
This ample collection also contains two fine sequences, one on wild flowers, the other, "A Lisbon Sheaf", including "Fado", which is both a song of sorts and an attempt to grasp what's at stake in the form, and "On a Rood-Screen in Worstead, Norfolk", about a virginal Portuguese saint:
"I sing a saint of Portugal, / Her name is Saint Uncumber, / And heaven does not hold a more / Resourceful little number."
Who better than Wright, then, to also sing of Didcot power station, lately demolished, but immortalised here in an exclamatory 18th century ode? They said it couldn't be done. They said it shouldn't be done. But he's gone and done it anyway: "Thou glade of past felicity, / Thy sap of electricity / Complicit in our veins for evermore!"
• Sean O'Brien's Collected Poems is published by Picador. To order Ode to Didcot Power Station for £7.46 (RRP £9.95), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
