Poetry inspired by Elizabeth Smart

By Grand Central Station We Sat Down and Wept is the stunning new anthology devised and edited by Kevin Cadwallender. Using Elizabeth Smart’s novella By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept as inspiration, Kevin selected lines, put a note on Facebook inviting poets write from the lines and received an overwhelming response.

This anthology features 57 poets from throughout the UK and includes a poem by Sebastian Barker (Elizabeth Smart’s son) who gave this book his blessing.

Published By Red Squirrel Press

http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?grandcentral

“The Invisible Ticking of Remorse”
(From ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’-
Elizabeth Smart)

It’s what I didn’t say and now words hang
like those plastic bags in an Autumn tree,
veils from missing brides; I know it was wrong
for words to be left between you and me,
as year after year I watched time escape,
and now I know, I didn’t say enough.
Like Hardy writing thirty years too late,
scribbling in the dark and cutting-up rough.
Tell me can poetry re-make the past?
Does it have that transforming quality?
Do you have a ready answer to that?
And what can and does it achieve for me?
What I didn’t say hurts, the knowing shocks,
I can’t balance the books; it’s loss that costs.

Tom Kelly

The above poem features in the anthology and in my new collection HISTORY TALKS

http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?history

From Jim Burns on the History Talks collection:

“How good it is to read poems about something real and which are written so directly and with rhyms that make them roll along. There’s a lot of truth there and a lot of love. “No Laughing Matter” is a real gem.”

And a review from the Poetry Book Society in their Spring Bulletin

“Tom Kelly is a prolific writer. In addition to his collections of poetry (of which this is the fifth), he has also penned numerous plays and this contributes to the real sense of drama that fills his poems. He writes about the North East past and present, and there is an impressive sense of place in all these poems. From ‘Flash Gordon’ who “shopping in Asda…keeps an eye on the check-out,” to “My father’s brother. Unmarried…He’d drink at dinnertime and worked nights in the Steel Works.” Perhaps it is in the final stanza of ‘Cold Morning’ that best sums up this collection and Tom’s visceral, immediate poetry. “I can’t see the future/imagine anything/apart from this.” History Talks.”

Poetry Book Bulletin, Spring, 2011

http://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/news/89/spring_bulletin/