Kit Wright Biography

British poet, born in Kent, educated at New College, Oxford. After teaching in a London comprehensive school, he lectured in English at Brock University, St Catherine's, Ontario, for three years. He became Fellow-Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1977. The Bear Looked over the Mountain (1977), his first collection of verse, was followed by subsequent volumes including Bump-Starting the Hearse (1983), From the Day Room (1983), Real Rags and Red (1988), Poems: 1974–1983 (1988), Short Afternoons (1989), and Great Snakes (1995). While some of his poems are outrightly comic, his originality and value consist largely in his ability to subordinate humour to the compassion and moral concern which are central to his writing. His seriocomic idiom is highly appropriate to his recurrent treatments of absurdity, confusion, and desperation as endemic conditions of urban modernity. He is also the author of numerous highly regarded collections of children's verse, which include Hot Dog (1981) and Cat among the Pigeons (1987).