Praise for Before the City

“Smart-mouthed and serious, sometimes bawdy and usually wise, the poems in Kirby Wright’s Before the City remind me of the paintings of Peter Brueghal, swarming with the large and small incidents of life. As one of the first editors to publish his poetry (the loopy portrait of the artist as a young man entitled "The Mark of the Ass"), I am only chagrined by not getting to publish other such gems as "Quake" or "The Architects," poems that show—in the hands of someone as engaged and as deft as Wright—how surrealism, lyricism and human commentary go hand and hand.”

— Daniel Bourne, Editor, Artful Dodge

“Kirby Wright’s gift is his ability to find the believable connections between people and landscape—a blending that is all the more unsettling and valid because it exposes, with an almost fierce determination, the uncertainty in human nature.”

— Sam Rasnake, Editor, Blue Fifth Review

Press

Maui Weekly, August 7, 2003
Before the City: Collected Poems and Prose Poems by Kirby Wright
The first collected works of Hawaii poet in a volume that encompasses several local themes as well as broad Mainland perspectives.
Reviewed by Joseph W. Bean

Poet Kirby Wright may be familiar to some in Hawaii as the writer of “Aloha, Liliuokalani,” a plaintive poem distributed hand to hand at the Liliuokalani statue during the 100-year anniversary of the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. In it, the poet cries out to the long-dead queen that “Kapiolani is a park. Kaiulani is a hotel…” and “now Kalakaua is an avenue.” Wright says, “That poem went on to win the Robert Browning Society Award and Kapono was considering putting music to the words.” Maybe Kapono never wrote the notes on paper, but there is song enough in the words and in the feelings expressed. Any reader will hear the blue, persistent melody.

Another of Wright’s poems, “Punahou Reunion,” was recently shared at final chapel, by the President of Punahou, with the school’s 2003 graduating class. Wright, obviously enough, is a Punahou graduate himself, and a poet of growing stature whose work has been published in many magazines, literary reviews and anthologies.

Finally, there is a book of Kirby Wright poetry—including about ten poems explicitly about Hawaii—that allows us to see his artistic embrace taking in the mainland and the islands and life itself. In more than 60 poems and prose poems, he reaches beyond the edges and prods beneath the skin of places from San Francisco to New Jersey, always demanding and discovering meaning.

For Maui readers, the poems set in Hawaii like “At 33,000 Feet” and “Moloka‘i Budget Vacation,” may be the most immediately accessible, but every reader should give every poem in Before the City a hearing. Although much more of the islands remains in Wright’s world view than this, it can certainly be said that his special talent for seeing and naming the essence of a place is a talent born in Hawaii, in aloha ‘aina, the love of the land in which a person has roots and hopes.”

Honolulu Star Bulletin, August 10, 2003
Before the City: Collected Poems and Prose Poems by Kirby Wright
Isle Pages: New Releases from Hawaii authors.
Reviewed by Burl Burlingame

The words that spill out of Hawaii-born, Punahou graduate Wright tend to seize you right by the lapels. Slam bam! The "prose" selections are like rambling liner notes for an art-rock project. The more formal "poems" are punchier, and in their spareness have greater power to goose the imagination. Some are award winners, such as "Aloha, Liliuokalani," and all show an eye for detail.