Luke Wright’s Stay-at-Home Dandy – a review

Posted on 13th June 2015

The Corn Hall’s quarterly Stand Up Poetry Club has been a show case for a delightfully eclectic selection of poets over the last few years. It’s perhaps fitting that, for the final session before the Hall closes for refurbishment, the evening’s curator gets top billing, and uses it to riff off his earlier persona of the Fat Dandy, with a new show featuring the stay at home version.

Support was provided by James Grady, a properly angry young man, whose emphatic style is clearly indebted to the path Wright had beaten ahead of him. Nonetheless, he has things of his own to say, about fast food, Groovatoriums and – somewhat improbably – Coventry. Engagingly self-effacing, he seemed genuinely embarrassed when press-ganged into doing his “rude one.”

Wright offered up a glam-dad, a teacher, a drinker, a toll booth operator and his father the commuter in his pleasingly coherent collection of poems, the sum of which is a lovingly crafted portrait of modern Britain. While we are used to hearing Wright trying out new material at the Corn Hall, it was a delight to hear that nascent work property bedded-in and delivered by this consummate showman.