THE WRONG JARROW Tom Kelly
SMOKESTACK BOOKS
REVIEW:
Jim Burns in AMBIT
April 2008
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:
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 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…
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
Have a look at the Smokestack site.
http://www.smokestack-books.co.uk/books/kelly.html
or Independent Northern Publishers
http://www.northernpublishers.co.uk/books/Wrong-Jarrow-The
You can order from Inpress
http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/the_wrong_jarrow_kelly_tom_i018344.aspx
or amazon
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wrong-Jarrow-Tom-Kelly/dp/0955106176/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208471500&sr=1-8
And here are some other reviews….
“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.
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…
A forceful little collection, unremitting yet not without a background compassion”
MICHAEL STANDEN
OTHER POETRY
Series 111 No.1
(December 2007)
Matt Simpson, in Critical Survey, writing of ‘The Wrong Jarrow’, from Smokestack Books, says, “Kelly writes with an uncomfortable rawness and directness… an honesty we are much in need of.”
And in North East History Vol. 38 2007 (October 2007)
“Gives a voice to the people whom we see so often staring out of grainy black and white photographs….These are documents of a fading industrial past, given a new angry voice of the continuing problems faced by the communities today.”
And here are two poems from the collection.
WAITING
(For Swan Hunters, Hawthorne Leslies, Palmers)
The bus stop has fewer passengers waiting
at seven o’clock in the morning.
More women now,
they huddle and flick cigarettes
that pin prick the gloom,
odd laughs hitting the silence.
The yards are finished.
Kids need to be told where the river is
and the cranes aren’t a fairground.
Some still believe
the river will return:
tankers and refits, the lot!
Delusions,
and fewer passengers are waiting.
Tom Kelly
AND NOW THAT
And now that
he can watch the clock for hours
and now that
he can count the bricks on the far wall
and now that
he knows next door’s every record
and now that
he’s joined the gang of statistics
and now that
he can’t adjust his hands and fingers
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.
Tom Kelly
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