The Wrong Jarrow: Reviews
Here is Alan Morrison’s recent review of THE WRONG JARROW in the recusant.
Alan Morrison on
Tom Kelly’s
The Wrong Jarrow
(Smokestack Books, 2007/10)
Smokestack Books
http://www.smokestack-books.co.uk/books/kelly.html
Norman Cornish Image on the cover
http://www.smokestack-books.co.uk/images/kelly.jpg
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 sense 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 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), an unempirical 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 it is 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, their bulging frames almost loaf-like in shape, their cloth capped heads tucked away from view, pints and fags in hands, as what looks like a Whippet stands between their ragged-trousered legs, is a superb image in chalks and charcoals by Norman Cornish, that 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 for especially the metropolitan elites.
Alan Morrison © 2010
Here is a link to the review in the recusant magazine
http://www.therecusant.org.uk/#/tom-kelly-wrong-jarrow-review/4541354783
And here are other reviews of THE WRONG JARROW
The Purple Patch Poetry Bests of 2009*
PURPLE PATCH SMALL PRESS
BEST OF 2009 LISTS
No. 1 THE WRONG JARROW
“Liked all your collections but thought The Wrong Jarrow had that extra edge that comes from it being the poet’s deeply felt subject – it also was the most consistent in standard all the way through of any collection I read in the quality/impact of the poems.”
Geoff Stevens, Editor, Purple Patch
And here is the review from
North East History Vol. 38 2007 (October 2007)
“Entitled The Wrong Jarrow after one of the poems featured, it offers an incisive view of life in the North-East where, despite the best efforts of political correctness, images of cobbled streets, smoky pubs, and flat capped men in huddled groups still persist to this day. Kelly describes towns and communities that have fought hard to throw off the shadow of Wigan Pier, and gives a voice to the people whom we see so often staring out of grainy black and white photographs. Some of his poems
are remarkably brief-four lines at their most concise-while others construct a winding narrative which draws you into the lives of the people.
Kelly’s other guise as a playwright shines through in the skilful way he constructs characters, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the sequence of poems inspired by the paintings and drawings of Norman Cornish. A fellow member of the Spennymoor Sketching Club along with Tom McGuiness, Cornish works explores the life and working class colliery community at work and leisure; in many ways they are archetypal, ‘pitman paintings’. Unfortunately the reader is only shown one of the images; Two men at Bar with Dog adorns the cover of the book, and the titles of the poems do not refer directly to the source. However anyone familiar with Cornish’s work and the poems takes you straight to the heart.
Deliberately avoiding descriptions of the image in most cases, Kelly looks instead to the people who feature within them-what are their thoughts, their hopes, their dreams? Particularly where Kelly has used Cornish drawings as inspiration-solid, robust images, utilising stark contrasts of black and white-he has approached them with the same passion and curiosity as those blurred black and white photos. These are documents of a fading industrial past, given a new angry voice of the continuing problems faced by the communities today. As Kelly aptly describes in the final stanza of ‘Misty Day’”:
This is the moment before it goes,
the time you will remember before the history bailiffs
do a reconstruction brick by brick
rebuild a world, make memory of this.”
Marie-Therese H. Mayne
North East Labour History Site:
http://serials.labourhistory.net/issues/issue_2840.asp
And Other Poetry
“Tom Kelly’s little volume portrays a reality left uncovered by the retreating tides of work and community. There is a poetic approach akin to the wood engraver Bewick, of a landscape bleaker by far than his .A whole section is inspired by the paintings of pit life by Norman Cornish. It is all very North-East but quite without the regional self-marketing Sid Chaplin warned us against. Kelly’s vignettes depict a Tyneside vacated of its values during the pitiless Eighties and particularly before the shiny sunrise of business park, waterside apartment and iconic what-not. The picture is bleak, not ‘gritty’ and the poet has largely digested the venom of his spleen, is realistic and keeps any sentiment ‘close to his chest’:
This is the moment before it goes,
the time you will remember before the history bailiffs
do a reconstruction job brick by brick,
rebuild a world, make memory of this.
(‘Misty Day’)
The portraits are either of old, redundant men:
And now that
he can watch the clock for hours
and now that
time is an obese burden
and now that
he knows it’s always going to be this way
he handles it badly
(‘And now that’)
Or of the subsequent generation(s)
A female Fagin selling drugs,
drinking, flirting and nodding sagely
to boys that could be her sons,
watching their eyes droop,
heavy as broken doors, smashed windows
(‘Their River’)
A forceful little collection, unremitting yet not without a background compassion”
MICHAEL STANDEN
OTHER POETRY
Series 111 No.1
(December 2007)
And Matt Simpson, in Critical Survey, writing of ‘The Wrong Jarrow’, from Smokestack Books, says,
“Tom Kelly is haunted by the ghosts of Jarrow marchers-Jarrow once called the The Town That Was Murdered:
My town’s got blood on the streets
they’re reading the Riot Act
and hunger’s a badge posted
on every stomach.
Voices on tape, the famous newsreel images, Bill Brandt photographs, the paintings of Norman Cornish all make Kelly feel he is living as a ghost in his own town that cannot (and shouldn’t be allowed to) forget its past, a past which not to have a kind of intense loyalty to is a betrayal:
This is the wrong Jarrow
the poverty needs to be more visible
this is the wrong Jarrow
there’s unemployment and deprivation
and no steelworks and shipyard and the clubs are dead
and there’s problem estates and no go areas
and drugs on tap.
but it’s the wrong Jarrow
it’s not what I want
not what I want at all.
It is not nostalgia. It’s too painful for that. As we can see Kelly writes with an uncomfortable rawness and directness. Not to do would also be a betrayal. Extracts such as the ones quoted here may look simplistic but it is far from that. The cumulative effect of reading this book is to be exposed to an honesty we are much in need of.”
Matt Simpson
Critical Survey
2007; VOL 19; NUMBER 3
And here is Jim Burns in AMBIT
Jarrow has a place in my memories. You didn’t have to live there or have been around during the worst days of the 1930’s to know what the name meant. For me, it always evoked pictures of unemployment and deprivation and, of course, the Jarrow Hunger Marchers slogging their way to London to be met by indifference on the part of the government. Things changed with the Second World War and after, but there came a time when the shipyards closed, the factories stood idle, and the miseries of unemployment returned.
Tom Kelly has Jarrow in his bones and his poems are shaped by the past. He knows that some people do live in comfort, but he reflects on the fact that, though times are good for some, there are areas where the old problems are in evidence:
there’s unemployment and depravation
and no steel works and shipyard and the club’s are dead
and there’s problem estates and no go areas
and drugs on tap.
Perhaps it’s the fact that few people fight back these days that bothers him? There is little communal feeling and people in his poems lead lonely lives as they drift through the streets:
He didn’t notice himself:
battered brown mac,
black slip ons, slipping off his feet,
grey trousers creased
above his ankles.
And there’s the factor that society didn’t have to contend with in the 1930’s:
A female Fagan, selling drugs,
drinking, flirting and nodding sagely
to boys that could be her sons,
watching their eyes droop,
heavy as broken doors, smashed windows…
It’s a bleak world that Kelly evokes, and I’m sure there are those who will say that he paints a one-sided picture. You can imagine a government minister pointing out how much money has been poured into the area and the jobs that have been created. But Kelly is a poet not a politician, and doesn’t apologise for what he does. There’s heartache and pain within these short, plainly-written poems.
Jim Burns
Ambit
April 2008
http://www.ambitmagazine.co.uk/indexnew.htm
And Kevin Bamford, Editor Borderlines
Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society NewsletterMARCH/APRIL 2008
Those of you, who have been reading BORDERLINES for some time, will probably remember the poems of Tom Kelly that we published some years ago. Well we have received a copy of his collection THE WRONG JARROW. It lives up to our feelings about his poetry. From the title you might expect some semi-political trite stuff about the problems of the north east. But no! These are Tom’s personal response to the things he sees and experiences living in the area. They can be poignant, touching, bleak, touched with humour, but always have an impact which comes from the persuasion that Tom feels deeply about the things he ‘s writing about. It’s a collection that deserves to be widely read.
And poet/editor/reviewer
Andy Croft
in The Morning Star
It is still a painful site of popular memory, made famous by grainy newsreels and Bill Brandt’s photographs. Tom Kelly has lived in Jarrow for most of his life. His new collection, The Wrong Jarrow (Smokestack Books, £7.95) takes a hard look at a part of north-east England that is still a shameful emblem of industrial decay and deprivation.
The writing is blunt, cold and spare, but raging and prophetic too. “This is the wrong Jarrow /there’s unemployment and deprivation/and no steel works and shipyard and the clubs are dead /and there’s problem estates and no go areas/and drugs on tap/But it’s the wrong Jarrow/It’s not what I want/not what I want at all/I’ll come back when it’s burning
Morning Star
Article on collection
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-184450105.html
THE WRONG JARROW available from INPRESS BOOKS
The Wrong Jarrow by Tom Kelly (Smokestack Books, £7.95)
The Northern Echo
Largely an elegy for the old North- East: the “Right Jarrow”, at least in public perception. Kelly observes:
The yard’s
dead, quiet.
Chains no longer
hold onto ships
onto lives.
A poem about Swan Hunter’s notes:
The yards are finished.
Kids need to be told where the river is.
A final sequence celebrates the paintings of Norman Cornish, one of which, Two Men at Bar with Dog, graces the cover.
The Northern Echo
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/leisure/1713881.The_Wrong_Jarrow_by_Tom_Kelly__Smokestack_Books____7_95_/
http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/the_wrong_jarrow_i018344.aspx
GAZETTE ARTICLE
Shields Gazette images of South Tyneside’s industrial past are captured in a book of poems by writer Tom Kelly. The Wrong Jarrow, a 64-page collection from the poet and playwright, looks at different aspects of the town’s life and social history. Drawing on work produced over more than a dozen years…
http://www.shieldsgazette.com/news/RAW-RHYMES-OF-TIMES-GONE.1952881.jp
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