Love-Lines & Keening With Spittal Tongues

The past is a foreign country, wrote LP Hartley. “They do things differently there.”
And yet how often we try to smuggle ourselves back across the borders of history and memory.
Kathleen Kenny’s Keening With Spittal Tongues and Tom Kelly’s Love-Lines (both Red Squirrel, £6.99) are strong and moving portraits in verse of north-east family life.
Kenny writes touchingly about the generations of women in her Geordie-Irish family, “the ones you imagine/in muddied petticoats/and full grey dresses/apple-cheeked/and hot-tempered/ running shoeless/in myths of redness.”
Jarrow-born Kelly writes about the layers of family memory, parents, grand-parents and children, hospitals and funerals, “the same old story” of unspoken loyalties like a “loop tape refusing/to snap, spool away.”
Reading these two books is like looking through someone else’s photograph albums containing the complex collective memories and stories, lies and silences that hold a family together.
On the one hand there is the common urge to “live in the past / when everything was perfect.”
On the other hand, we sometimes need to “remember not to remember.”

Andy Croft in the Morning Star
Wednesday July 15th 2009

The Morning Star
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/culture/regulars/andy_croft/preserving_memories

The collection has already had a tremendous review from The Poetry Book Society:

“Kelly’s third collection, and his second to be published by the Red Squirrel Press, builds brilliantly upon the themes of his earlier work and resounds with a rawness, pathos and humour that leaps from the page and seems to whisper charmingly in your ear like an old friend. A proud son of the North East, his poetry is preoccupied with place and loss, with a faultless ear for the nuances of his native Tyneside, picking out the small details of everyday life and making them sing, from memories of awkwardly sharing a urinal with his father to nights spent wistfully looking through photograph albums,
gazing at pictures that ‘umbrella the light but stop a long way short of living’. These are vivid, compelling and often beautiful poems, by turns sad and uplifting, that certainly deserve a wide readership.”

Poetry Book Society
http://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/

Geoff Stevens gives a succinct summary of LOVE-LINES in the most recent issue of Purple Patch, Number 123, July 2009

Soldiers, family relatives, plead for another chance to describe life in their POW camp, to get a better innings,to know Chekhov, to shake the dewdrop off the end of their nose. He visits the loo with his dad and Frank O’Hara, finds a key that’s lost it’s owner in a drawer, sees short trousered gangsters grow bald, fat, drunk, surly.

More info from Red Squirrel
http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?lovelines