The first sequence of poems gave me that claustrophobic, breathless feeling of being trapped in church during procedures. Believers would I think be at one with them, they do evoke the atmosphere. I like it when the outreach collection box of the Kelly’s is returned with a button in it!

Great snapshots of wonderful but poor past lives in the north-east, lost except for memories. Shipyards closed, the Fever Hospital, the night shift…

Geoff Stevens

Purple Patch 126, June 2010

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

Somewhere in Heaven

Available from Red Squirrel Press

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