Pub Grub offers a feast of Poetry

Posted on 6th September 2025

It’s always worth settling in early for a Luke Wright show, if only to tick off his excellent pre-show warm up tunes. Intriguingly for a man born in the early eighties, you have to wonder whether the energy and invention of the likes of Elvis Costello, The Fall or Magazine inform his work.

When he does bounce on stage with his signature flourish it’s to make a confession. Despite the title of his latest show, it’s not really about Pub Grub. We did get an opening poem extolling the virtues of fatty, over cooked comfort food, and very funny it was too, but it also felt a little like a contractual obligation. The evening was actually dominated by poems about friends and family. Archaeology explored the faux anger he shared with his wife on the Jurassic Coast, while Hugs spoke of the simple joy of hugging his son. Fish and Chips marvelled at how politely his grown up son ordered his food. In Chelmsford, he wandered around for hours with his best mate. As an angry young man he would take issue with his Dad, only for his Mum to cleverly defuse those arguments.

Interspersed between the poetry was much levity, not least in the repeated call backs to a knowingly lame joke about a man in a pub, retold in French, univocally, and finally in iambic pentameter. This seemingly frivolous aside actually underlined Wright’s increasing emphasis on the nature of poetic structure itself. He loves to impose playful restrictions on his work, partly to see what emerges but also, as he explained, as a device to kick start a creative process that of late, he has struggled with. So we got a poem about Donald, a dramatic diatribe demonstrably dominated by discourse derived from the D division of the dictionary. Town Not Gown explored his love of univocal poems. What a task, and what a dab hand at that craft! He even imposed the structure of a John Betjeman work to tell one of the most affecting poems of the evening.

Yes, it was bliss, to listen to Luke Wright in Diss.