Douglas Houston reviews Dreamers in a Cold Climate
Staple Magazine Issue 72, Spring 2010

DREAMERS IN A COLD CLIMATE
Tom Kelly

Tom Kelly’s Dreamers in a Cold Climate is deeply rooted in the past and present of Tyneside. The autobiographical trajectory of the first part gives continuity to its multi-faceted treatments of self and place. ‘Geordie’ follows, a long dramatic monologue, heavily salted with Tyneside dialect. It traces the purposeless, pub-centred drifting of a life formerly given structure and meaning by decades of work in the now-defunct shipyards. The passing of heavy industry and the local identity it shaped are inextricably linked to the social, cultural, and psychological dereliction embodied in Geordie himself. His dispossession assumes universality in an age when globalisation‘s first casualties are localised traditional industries: “Now? What wi got? / Bloody bingo and karaoke./The Japanese took wa ships./Giv’ us bloody karaoke./ Not much of aa swap…”
While the past is looked back to for vanished cultural cohesion, the poems drawing on personal experience also evoke a childhood sense of the constraints of an industrial status quo that imposed narrow limits on imagination and opportunity: “His wants are clagged/in his mouth/clapped shut with ignorance, /a dry fish trapped in concrete”.
Kelly’s entry into the working life Tyneside has ordained for him is noted in ‘1964: the Time Office, Mercantile Dry Dock, Jarrow,’ firmly sealing his connection with Geordie’s lost shipbuilding past. “Now go to the site:/shipyard, dock gone…//take this image:/ship and men mauling the dock, /me praying over a ledger”.
Subsequent poems follow his life far beyond that point, through the deaths of parents and birth of a daughter to a plateau of cautious lyricism where memory and the present interpenetrate: “wait/and/then recall/the memory/that flutters/like a bird/in your cupped hands/flying unsteadily, /
Painfully away”. The thematic and local integration of Dreamers in a Cold Climate gives the collection something of the unity of a single long poem. Read as such, its impact is impressive.

DOUGLAS HOUSTON

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