Spelk

By Tom Kelly

From Red Squirrel Press

Review taken from Mistress Quickly’s Bed, Issue 8, Spring 2016

http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/SquirrelCAT%20SQUIRREL.html

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 21^st 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

Poetry Talk

June 2^nd, 2016

Review

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 tells 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 skilfully 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