It is good to know that my ‘History Talks’ poetry collection is selling really well, to be re-printed and the reviews have been very good.

You can buy a copy from Red Squirrel.
And see me on You Tube. What more could you want?
Plus a photo (and others) on Red Squirrel Face Book.

Follow the link.

HISTORY TALKS FROM RED SQUIRREL PRESS

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

And here are some of the reviews:

“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

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

Jim Burns

From New Writing North Site

“With his fifth collection, History Talks, Tom Kelly says, “My poetry is very much about the North East. I try and give a voice to those lost by the changes we have witnessed: the move from heavy to light industry and the impact on people and their communities.” The result is quietly profound – often depicting everyday scenes in understated language, which drills down straight to the heart. “Tell me can poetry re-make the past?” he asks in The Invisible Ticking of Remorse. Perhaps not, but re-imagining the past with compassion and care is nonetheless a powerful trick.

Tom is a Jarrow-born poet and playwright. After 25 years as a drama lecturer at South Tyneside College, he now devotes himself full-time to writing and other creative projects. Theatre-goers may recognise Tom by his plays, including Nothing Like the Wooden Horse and I Left My Heart in Roker Park.”

Laura Fraine
From New Writing North
http://www.newwritingnorth.com/writer-tom-kelly-natalie-scott-and-michael-brown-details-224.html

“Tom Kelly’s new collection History Talks is a book about violence.

“At its heart are three violent deaths – the slow suicide of everyman figure ‘Geordie’, an ex-shipyard worker and alcoholic, the hanging of the Sunderland poisoner Mary Ann Cotton and the gibbeting of the Jarrow miner William Jobling: who is ‘Stuffed in a barrow,/ hauled up the gibbet:/ monument to authority… Union dead,/ corpse lies/ waiting spring/to rise.’

“There is the casual violence of the unemployed kids down the shops, ‘comparing tattoos, kicking shop doorways,/ waiting for night to make their history.’ There are the bar-brawlers and the wife-beaters, north-east working-class lives where fists arrive ‘regular as debt.’

“And behind all these stories lies generations of economic violence – ‘Hunga, hunga,/ each bugger’s face/ lined with want.

“It’s Kelly’s best book yet and that’s saying a lot.”

Andy Croft, Morning Star

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/102609

“Tom Kelly’s new collection History Talks from Red Squirrel Press is a stark and powerful reminder of a poetry that closely engages with and draws upon the social realities of contemporary living, while tracing roots back through personal, familial and regional history. This kind of poetry is an increasingly rare phenomenon and I found it a welcome antidote to the torrent of l’art pour l’art that characterises too much of the UK’s contemporary poetry. Rendered in a pared down minimalism to reveal the essential resonant image, his poems are emotive, often heartbreaking and unflinching in their observational accuracy.

Dole money
Folded in his top pocket,
Stiff sliver of hope
Turning sour.

“Kelly writes not as an outsider prying into the troubled lives of his subjects, but from a position of keen understanding, with empathy and compassion. Indeed some of the more autobiographical poems express a vulnerability and explore feelings of loss and regret which few contemporary poets would have the courage to voice in such a manner, without resorting to some degree of self conscious Post-Modern irony. There is no place for such artificial cleverness and evasiveness in Kelly’s work.

I cry,
Hard sobs.
My heart aches dad
For you.

“The collection is firmly located in the North East. The recurring themes of hardship, loss, love and survival, however, are far from parochial. In some parts Kelly employs the Geordie dialect, bringing to life the voices of the characters and narrators, and allowing them to comment upon their situations, questioning their motivations, such as in the sequence about Mary Ann Cotton, who was hung in Durham jail in 1873 for poisoning her family, including sixteen of her children.

De ye want th’ truth? How many aa killed?
Put that in ya book, tell th’ world.
“Yet the sequence, avoiding sensationalism, picks away at the possible reasons for the murders and as always Kelly keeps a clear eye on the social and economic factors that influence behaviour.

You said nothing at your trial, told to be quiet,
Ignorance a weapon used against you and your silent kind.
“As well as little gems like Cold Morning, Dad in the Rain and Joyous Screen (the last of which in eight short lines brilliantly juxtapositions the gaudy Hollywood musical Seven Brides For Seven Brothers against the bleak reality of Tyneside in the 50s). The poems illustrate a fine craftsmanship, without the craft being overworked or obtrusive, as in the opening of No Laughing Matter:

Living next to dread,
Close to the lip
Of everything but food.

“There is no wastage, no superfluous decoration, even the longer narrative poems like Geordie and Jobling are wrought in simple, straight forward vocabulary and tightly honed images. I consider this collection vital work with something to say, and which echoes the essence of Brecht’s last poem AND I ALWAYS THOUGHT

And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone’s hearts must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself—
Surely you see that.
Bertolt Brecht”

Bob Beagrie

“Short, sharp recollections of the north-east. Great lines, ‘when the wind was whoring against our house/I think of you…. dying in washed-out pyjamas amongst strangers.’

“This is a book for Geordies and strangers alike.”

Geoff Stevens, Purple Patch No. 128, Spring 2011

“Jarrow-born Tom Kelly now lives happily further up the Tyne at Blaydon. This is his fifth collection and fourth published by Red Squirrel Press. In History Talks he looks at past and present in the North East, from William Jobling, the last man gibbeted in the north; Mary Ann Cotton, the nineteenth century murderer; his late father; Geordie, an Everyman, who first appeared in Dreamers in a Cold Climate, and others trying to make sense of their lives today. Once again ‘Kelly is preoccupied with place and loss’.”

Poetry Book Society Bulletin

HISTORY TALKS FROM RED SQUIRREL PRESS

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