DEVIZES Festival 2013 got off to a rollicking start when performance poet Luke Wright took to the stage in the Merchants Suite at the Corn Exchange on Wednesday night.

It is five years since the 6ft 4in baby-faced performer visited Devizes but, judging from the audience reaction, he is remembered with affection. He specialises in poetry that Byron would not have recognised but delights today’s audience with its robustness, sharpness of observation and uproarious humour.

Maturity and fatherhood have done nothing to diminish Mr Wright’s energy and charm. He launched straight into a diatribe about the sighting of a lion in Essex which, despite the revelation that the creature was actually someone’s Maine Coon cat, many insisted they had still seen a “lion”.

Maturity has also brought a thickening of the waist to Mr Wright and The Paunch was also celebrated in verse. He is not above pillorying his 16-year-old self and read a piece he had written at that age, bringing hope to all of us who expressed our adolescent selves in moody free verse.

He reminisced about when the BBC filmed an episode of Lovejoy in his village and the result had overtones of Dylan Thomas and Louis Macniece. Mr Wright, although closer to stand-up comic than poetry reciter, is no mean master of the English language.