Poetry Reviews
Tom Kelly Poetry Reviews
http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/reviews/reviews__issue_28.htm#SOMEWHERE_IN_HEAVEN
http://www.tomkelly.org.uk/poetry-reviews-of-tom-kelly/
Tom Kelly has published five collections The Time Office, Red Squirrel Press ISBN 978-906700-35-5 is a selection with some new work. Kelly is a north-east poet and his work is grounded in the hardship and distance from metropolitan power. The former inspires less bitterness than a protective embracing of these values of gentleness, understanding and mutual support which oppose the forces of dehumanization. Kelly is the poet of small gestures. He eschews great rhetorical flourishes, fixed certainties or confident predictions, preferring to search for those moments of happy surprise amidst the dross which are as heartening as a primrose on a bombsite. He is a poet of simple clarity but of no glib simplicities. His work rings with Geordie accents, the sound of steel on steel, the silence of imposed idleness and the despairing sigh of poverty; but there is always a kernel of joy and a memorable line. Anyone who missed his five collections would do well to catch up.
Alan Dent
http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/books/too_much_toothache.htm
http://www.therecusant.org.uk/tom-kelly-wrong-jarrow-review/4541354783
Dreamers in a Cold Climate
Tom Kelly
(Red Squirrel Press)
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 reviews Dreamers in a Cold Climate Tom Kelly
Staple Magazine
Love-Lines
“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.”
The Poetry Book Society Bulletin Spring, 2009
Preserving memories
Wednesday 15 July 2009
Morning Star
by Andy Croft
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.”
Taken from Morning Star
July 15th 2009
Red Squirrel Press
http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?lovelines
“It’s Kelly’s best book yet and that’s saying a lot.”
Andy Croft, Morning Star March 24
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/102609
“He writes about the North East past and present and there is an impressive sense of place.”
Poetry Book Society 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
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
Bob Beagrie
“This is a book for Geordies and strangers alike”
Geoff Stevens, Purple Patch
Reviews of History Talks Tom Kelly
“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
Morning Star
Wednesday 23 March 2011
by Andy Croft
Tom Kelly’s new collection History Talks (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99) 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/index.php/news/content/view/full/102609
History Talks: Review by Bob Beagrie
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 U.K.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 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
Review Bob Beagrie
History Talks
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
New Writing North Review
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.
Laura Fraine
New Writing North
http://www.newwritingnorth.com/writer-tom-kelly-natalie-scott-and-michael-brown-details-224.html
Somewhere in Heaven by Tom Kelly
Kelly’s fourth collection continues the theme of his last
collection, Love Lines – the acute sense of loss in his north-east
England. He walks along the Tyne lamenting the loss of heavy
industry and its impact on the community.
The poem ‘Sunday in Winter’ perhaps best sums up Kelly’s
concern – a man, searching for his past life, now lost, wonders
whether it was all a dream: “some stranger’s life rifled / allowed
a dream to sneak in, / filch its corrupt way into this unbearable
aching”. In this wonderfully observed collection, Kelly captures
a world we need to hear and see.
PBS Bulletin Spring 2010
Tom Kelly’s The Time Office (Red Squirrel Press) is a mixture of new poems and selections from his five previous collections. The North–East of England is brought sharply into focus in its rawness and its compassion and you had better not mistake that last word for patronising near-relation ‘Pity’: these poems present a world that is known from the inside and the poet’s accuracy of detail and concern prowl around the edge to prevent any easy attitudinising.
Ian Brinton
Tears in the Fence
Number 55 Summer 2012
Spelk Two reviews
Review by Alan Dent taken from Mistress Quickly’s Bed, Issue 8, Spring 2016
Fifty poems, mostly left-justified, some organized in stanza and rhyme employed with delicacy.
Spelk is a northern word for splinter. Kelly uses it as a metaphor for the way the north-east is under his skin. It is customary to think of place like Jarrow as backward, depressed, grey milieu, anyone who can escapes from. The best route, of course, is education; but Kelly is highly educated man who has stayed and belongs. He doesn’t write about the place that bred him with a sense of disdain but from a genuine sense of belonging to its places, people, habits and struggles. As much happens to people here to anywhere else, and he is determined to write about it.
That in itself is, of course, subversive. It goes without saying in our culture that important events happen in cities, to the well-heeled, the famous, the influential. Only this week Lord Hague, that mixed-voweled bundle of braggart confusion, has agreed with a Tory back-bencher that forcing MP’s to reveal their tax returns may result in Westminster being populated by “low-achievers. ” That’s how the elite think of ninety-nine percent of the population. A place like Jarrow is populated by “low achievers.” The “high achievers” are in Gerrard’s Cross but you wouldn’t want to live among them.
“Gannin’ down th’ pit an’ th’ fear rises like sap
An’ me first an’ last thought, will aa ever come back.”
begins the poem about the Jarrow pit disaster of 21st August 1845. Typical of Kelly’s direct style, it evokes difficult reality and the tragedies it engenders. The Ballad of The Forgotten makes poems from the testimonies to the children’s employment commission of 1842. They are truly tragic stories of the abuse of young lives. Kelly is wise to let the children’s voices speak (as in the famous song composed of the words of Patience Kershaw). Yet there will be no doubt be some who wonder why he returns to events of a century and half ago. Perhaps it’s because he’s alert to how our culture has engaged in organising forgetting over the past three and half decades. Keeping alive the memory of injustice is the way we avoid it. Forgetting is prone to fuel unwonted optimism.
These are quiet, modest poems which speak particularly of places, people and experiences our culture would like to forget. We are living through an age of remarkable technological advance and that always diverts attention from the social. Who cares about injustice if you can plug in your i-pad? But Kelly is right. Our gizmos are made in factories where people are abused for profit. Kelly is insistent that we must stare at how we relate to one another. We must keep memory alive so we can learn how to transform our relationships. Which is not quite how they think in Gerrard’s Cross.
Alan Dent
`Spelk` by Tom Kelly. Red Squirrel Press.
Tom Kelly deals with `the fragility of existence` in other ways. Existence depends on the evidence we leave and that evidence can be fragile to the point of non-existence. In `Spelk` his eighth book of poetry he tackles the problematical issues of memory and evidence.
In the `Ballad of the Forgotten` a suite of poems he gives those who have left little or no evidence of their existence a voice. Their names are recorded in the clipped formal words of the 1842 Children’s Employment Commission into the employment of children in the mines. These are third person observations. Tom Kelly has added a voice to each name in rhyming couplets and dialect words. Thomas Dotchin, James Strong, William Ranson, Thomas Lashley, seven to nine year olds, trappers in the pits , slaves in reality , rise up from these pages with a voice.
These voices tell us of their hopes and aspirations, unfulfilled, and of their fears and terrors, particularly of explosions, two of which are recorded here.
The mute dead are brought into focus, none more so than Ann Mills, the thirty five year old wife of a miner, with an ailing husband, forced to send her remaining children, four of the seven having already died, down the pit. Her life is one of grinding labour with few comforts:
“It`s not aal doom an` gloom but it`s not far away
As love me mornings before th` light has it`s day.”
Tom links this effort at recovery with the fate of modern day children in the opening sequence of the collection. Inequality produces a more mixed picture but there are still the abused, the deprived, the brutalised. In `Knowledge` he records:
“She doesn`t say, you don`t love me .
Why you staring?
She screams and screams,
silenced with a slap.”
We apparently still need Royal Commissions to tell us about the problems some children and their parents face as the opening quotation from the 2015 Commission into Social Mobility and Child Poverty shows.
Pursuing the issues of memory and evidence Tom reflects on the example of his own Grandfather, James Robert Henderson, criminalised at ten and enlisted , sentenced, to serve on the `Wellesley` training ship at the age of twelve. In `Inmates under warrant` he explains the difficulty of memory recovery:
“A hundred years and fears away,
this search for you makes me prickle with loss.
I failed in not knowing you,
looking into your grey eyes,
asking questions I knew nothing about.”
Not only do we ask the wrong questions but there is an added problem, the source of our evidence may be incapable of revealing their testimony. Tom writes in the title poem `Spelk`:
“You learnt so much on the Wellesley
Never say what you feel,
tattooed on your heart,
there it stayed.”
As a result the poet /historian can only stitch together the fragments using his informed imagination as a guide. In `Me and Granda` he reflects:
“Now I try to say just some of the ways
that he said nothing and I speak for him.”
In the `Prologue` to `The Ballad of the Forgotten` he comments on this task of necessary resurrection:
“Now they stir under your feet,
wish they were in someone`s hearts.
They are the `unnamed` that speak
and live when our voices start.”
In the last poems of the collection more fragments are woven together in poems from Jarrow`s recent history, childhood dreams, memories of family, a striking poem in memory of Eileen O`Shaughnessy, the wife of Eric Blair , the famous George Orwell.
Overall this is a very satisfying work. Strongly political in intention it weaves historical recreation skillfully with a meditation on the nature of history and how a variety of `pasts`, individual and communal can be constructed. This of course is vital work as that opening quotation from the 2015 Commission makes clear:
“Parents, communities, schools, colleges, councils, employers and universities all will need to take a lead if Britain is to avoid being a permanently divided nation.”
How else can we tackle issue of poverty and social mobility today if we do not take action at every level. That also means action at the level of poetry. Tom Kelly`s collection is a brave attempt to show where we have come from in the recent past, where we are now, and whether we have made progress. It also explains the difficulties of arriving at a sensible, comprehensible and yet relevant comparison.
This is important work and I for one am glad to see a fine poet tackling it.
Keith Parker 2016
June 2nd, 2016
Alan Morrison on
Tom Kelly’s
The Wrong Jarrow
(Smokestack Books, 2007/10)
Not Just a Bit Crack
It’s not difficult to see why this collection came first in the Purple Patch Best Small Press Collections 2009: these are poems about as unpretentious as it gets, infused with raw expression, aphorismic spontaneity, and an empirical curl into working-class Tyneside idiom, bare-faced Northern warmth and authenticity, and that DNA-hard-wired sense of community and collective belonging that Southerners (myself included) can only envy. The monologue ‘Nostalgia Kid’ is a strong and worthy example:
Twenty years ago it was milk & honey,
Garden of Eden had nothing on those days.
Beer two pence a pint, everybody smiled…
…
Best years of me life: Nothing like now. Shit days.
Everything’s dead, like a bloody cemetery.
You could live, not like now: go on buy me a pint.
Here Kelly has similarities with the regional mimicry of Welsh poet Gwilym Williams; but in his sparse no-frills style and allegorical, almost fabular quality of narrative tone and social snapshot that Kelly shares perhaps most in common with Wigan poet Peter Street. Both Kelly and Street are what certain circles might term ‘naifs’, conceivably ‘autodidacts’, and bearing in mind such influential voices as WH Davies and Stevie Smith are described in both terms, this is far from a criticism. Both Kelly and Street are versatile and can move their voices between regional and class dialects and idioms; both are very much poets of place, nostalgic for their roots, as if those roots half-define them – and both are essentially working-class poets (which is not meant in any patronising sense) in the true pith of such a term, in that they are detectably still a part of their backgrounds, even if they may have moved on geographically.
There is a casualness to Kelly’s use of language (typographically too in the lower case titles and frequent use of ampersands) but it’s not a prosaic one by any means – earthy, gritty, visceral as much working-class poetry can be, it is mostly always colourful, and effortlessly figurative and aphorismic:
It’s a slow death
taking a day at a time
and filling it
with what will eventually kill him.
…
Now his mouth searches for words,
his eyes glisten
and his glass is empty.
(‘empty glass’)
At the corner
they kill time
as time kills them.
Nowt.
‘Nowt’ stamped on foreheads
leaden hands and hearts.
(‘my kind of town i’)
Like Street, Kelly has an effortless knack at nailing the telling trope:
The police helicopter’s
A gigantic moth
Circling grubby lives.
(‘estate’)
Kelly’s Lowreyesque observations of post-industrial life, and historical class-memory of the bygone colliery life, frequently bleed into serendipitous profundities:
‘Learn the children to pray for me,’
Death inevitable as the failing light
That smudged forty men and boys.
And a sublime lyricism born from witness:
Today I told my daughter
That this stone was coal,
That it gave warmth,
Burning like a prayer
In the cold dark.
(‘message on a bottle – Seaham Colliery explosion 1880)
‘the river again’ could have come straight out of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists:
…women clasp corners
Waiting for their men
feeling like catchers
grabbing white hot rivets of money
before their men spend wages on anything
but on what they should.
Such a perennial passage, touching on the way in which wage labour, below a living wage, is indirectly robbed after tax through the advertisement culture tempting workers into wasting their hard-earned cash on fags and drink, rather than food and clothes – though in such a limited and grinding lifestyle, such opiates can be seen as necessities.
Kelly has a sharp eye for grim poetic ironies:
He carries the bairn on his shoulders,
‘One day this will be yours’
tattooed in the sky.
Pathos is ubiquitous in these monodies of oppressed industrial lives:
The moment before waking
when you can remake everything,
turn clocks back and forward
(‘game’)
And I’d recommend to the metropolitan elites of contemporary poetry who no doubt think poverty is confined to that limbo period between University and one’s first academic job, reading Kelly’s moving ‘getting by badly’:
It’s trying not to think about the aggravation
& damp shoes and that bar of stress across my back,
& it’s the waking up two hours before you have to
& re-runs of crap days…
Such impoverished sentiments are probably of a social class template that many contemporary metropolitan poets might assume to be in a cloth-capped past, or a purely figurative present, but their proximity is, time-wise, much closer to home. ‘all that’s left’ is a touching lyric which plaintively captures the powerlessness of the human condition:
what we have is me & you: this is the moment
saying what we feel is all that’s left.
…that, ultimately human beings have only the power to express their powerlessness, but somehow that feels comforting in itself and a true power indeed.
Some of the most powerful writing in this collection is in the second section, ‘Poems inspired by the paintings and drawings of Spennymoor artist, Norman Cornish’ (another similarity to Peter Street, who wrote a series of poems for artist Tony Bevan): ‘Colliery Road and Man’ shows us a touching symbiosis:
he knows every step
of his road
and it gets no easier.
These are again very much working-class monologues, as in the Geordie tongue of ‘the faces are ours’:
…me Granda, Tot, never knew he smoked cigarettes
it was always a pipe that he smacked and then spat on the fire.
…
…uncle Tommy that would give you his last
if he had it that day. Then there’s Jackie, dyed-in-the-
wool Communist,
no hymns at his funeral; always dapper, articulate and sad.
One wonders whether the isolation of ‘wool’ with ‘Communist’ has unconscious overtures of the historic British working-class’s instinctive sense of the Far Left as, at best, a bit daft (at worst, unpatriotic, hence the once-common snub of ‘Red’). In these social monodies there is a Lowreyesque quality, and for Southerners (myself included), a televisually empirical When the Boat Comes In point of reference:
Coal dust bags his lungs, he loses phlegm
on the way to the pub. Smoke mists his face,
waters his eyes; his cap’s stuck at a jaunty angle…
(‘still a lad’)
Perhaps the best poem in the book, and certainly my favourite, is the moving and excellently descriptive ‘man alone’, the subject of which is the ghost of a once proud working man – we are told:
disappointment anoints him,
might-have-been’s tear him to shreds.
The final stanza I quote in full:
He is outside every company, ‘He’s best ignored’,
somebody once said. He wears a muffler
and his shirt’s worn out. His ex-working hands
soft as a bairn’s as he searches for a callous
to recall who he was. All he finds is an old man’s hands.
This is working-class observation of the highest quality.
‘men at the bar’ is a witty piece, and again draws on the Geordie patois memorable from stalwart series such as When the Boat Comes In:
might as well have a bit crack.
The cemetery’s dead quiet.
‘fish and chip shop’ gifts another memorable proletarian aphorism:
…I head home with me fish and chips
keeping me warm as I’ll ever feel.
‘two women’ ends idiomatically on:
‘See ya tomorrow’. ‘If ah’m spared,’ they don’t say.
‘newcastle supporter’ ends equally strongly, in phonetic Geordie vernacular:
The world’s changed
aa haven’t. It’s different and aa’m not crying,
not that you’d ever see me in tears.
And there is the hard-bitten stoicism of Northern masculinity that has withstood so much cultural assault over the last thirty years of industrial attrition. The Wrong Jarrow is a tribute in many ways to the fading industrial culture of the North – those old Labour heartlands – and their last generation of colliers, limping on almost like emasculated museum pieces. Above all, it is a collection of highly memorable, grittily pictorial monodies, which could well go on to inspire its own responses in painting, vividly drawn as the poems are. The cover, ‘Two Men at a Bar with a Dog’ – being a couple of burley labourers leant shoulder to shoulder at a bar, bulging frames almost loaf-like in shape, cloth capped heads tucked away from view, as are the pints and fags they commune over, as what looks like a Whippet stands between their ragged-trousered legs – is a superb image in chalks and charcoals by Norman Cornish, which evokes so sinuously the hands-on labouring life of the old North – and is more than matched by the tough-loving lyricism of Tom Kelly in this brilliant slice of colloquial working-class poetry. Recommended, especially for the metropolitan elites.
Alan Morrison © 2010
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