Poems, reviews, links and a photograph: what more do you want?

The Jarrow born poet and playwright has worked with John Miles on three staged musicals, with Alan Price, on Kelly, a musical documentary and the subject of a BBC Arena Programme (“There won’t be a dry eye in the house,” Lord Mountbatten). He has recently released a DVD, entitled Voices by WMDJ, an artists’ collective made up Kelly, Steve Thompson and Peter Dixon.

He has had many productions at the Customs House, South Shields:

“his writing strikes a chord with local audiences… even though his themes may be universal… the settings and characters are very Tyneside.”

British Theatre Guide

“Tom Kelly provides pathos and humour as John Sullivan does in the best of Fools and Horses”

Evening Chronicle

In 2007 he had a poetry collection The Wrong Jarrow from Smokestack Books:

“Kelly writes with an uncomfortable rawness and directness… an honesty we are much in need of.”

Matt Simpson, Critical Survey

“Jarrow is in his bones… there is heartache and pain in these poems”

Jim Burns, Ambit

Dreamers in a Cold Climate is his new poetry collection from Red Squirrel Press.

“It is a beautiful elegy to work and the industrial working class.”

Morning Star

His next collection from Red Squirrel, Love-Lines, will be published in February 2009. A new play, Nothing Like the Wooden Horse is to be produced by the Customs House, South Shields, in March 2009; it will also be published by Red Squirrel Press.

Dreamers In A Cold Climate

speak when spoken to,
worry when teachers shout,
working with slow children they are patient,
sit at the front
away from trouble at the back of the class.

They are the quiet ones
the dreamers,
ignoring digs in the back
from classroom terrorists.

They tell the time to slow learners
as time runs away from them.

That Night Somewhere Distant

and the Animals are on the record player
and Burdon’s singing, ‘Baby Let Me Take You Home’
and it’s so quiet outside and the world is suspended

and we are strangers in this small town
and so we talk in virtual whispers
and we shush the breeze

and we dance and the music goes on
and round and down into our very souls
and I listen to my heartbeat

and it stamps itself through me
and I move in the same way over and over again

and the opening of ‘House of The Rising Sun’ kicks in
and we sing loud and proud and forget to whisper.

REVIEWS…..

“As a fellow-Tynesider, I was pleased to read this in my ‘native’ idiom. Tom brings it off very well, and I congratulate him on a truly poetic dialect voice perfectly expressed in print. Through his command of the idiom I have loved since childhood, I have been swept back in memory to the atmosphere of all my working-class childhood and youth. The voice is absolutely convincing, and very appealingly managed in print – something very difficult to do with our gruff yet musical gift of self-expression – half proud, half uneasy about the effect it can make – often astonishingly memorable, as for example The Boot and its rough-tongued companion Unmarked. I can smell the coal dust and the drying fishing nets on the Tyne and in all its sloping riverbank roofs. Another poem (among many) I found really memorable is The Business and the translation (not too much ‘after’ T’Ao Ch’ien) whose poems I translated long ago.

“And I was absolutely swept away by the long sequence, Geordie in which both character and dialect are really compellingly evoked. It held me right to the end. I felt that it deserves to be illustrated by some sympathetic cartoonist who really knows and loves the Tyne and its working men – now so often unemployed or grown too old in the shipyards and engineering works that were once the glory of the Tyne. I think Tom Kelly is a unique poet – who ought to write a novel or short stories…”

James Kirkup

“The first half of Tom Kelly’s Dreamers in a Cold Climate is a series of bleak, tender monochrome portraits of growing up in Jarrow in the 1960s. Speak when spoken to / worry when teachers shout. You joined the gang or ran every play time away from fists and kicks.

“The second half of the book is a long sequence about a Geordie everyman, a skilled worker and grafter who is bewildered by ‘life after work’. Th’ Japanese took wa ships / giv’ us bloody karaoke / Not much of a swap. It is a beautiful elegy to work and to the industrial working class, Thatcher was shameless / Greed: mak’ th’ rich richor ‘Where’d that leave us?’ / Ask every miner / steel workers at Consett / shipyards: aal gone / Black days and neets.”

Andy Croft, 21st Century Verse, Morning Star (21/05/2008)

From Red Squirrel site
http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/index.php?dreamers