This is my first collection of poems and prose and thirteenth book published by Red Squirrel Press.

www.redsquirrelpress.com

Launches….

Newcastle Lit & Phil, Monday April 8

Cullercoats Library, Tuesday April 9

The Word, South Shields Library, Wednesday April 10.

https://www.redsquirrelpress.com/product-page/walking-my-streets-tom-kelly

 

WALKING MY STREETS Poems and Prose

Tom Kelly

ISBN 9 781913632625

Red Squirrel Press

£10

 

Three sections, an introductory trio, forty-three poems and eight prose pieces. The poems are left-justified and unrhyming.

 

Tom Kelly is never far from the workplace. He centres, like Fred Voss, Martin Hayes and Graham Fulton in some of his poems, on the odd and appalling fact of employment. Commonly, we speak of “work” when we mean the relationship of employer and employee. Work is natural and beneficial; employment is anything but. The pro-slavery arguments of the American historian George Fitzhugh are worth looking at for the light they throw on the moral outrageousness of employment: he contends that slave-owners are more moral than employers because they own their slaves, have a personal relation with them, see them as persons, even if inferior, while employers simply buy labour beyond which they have no interest in their employees. His arguments for slavery are, of course, morally invalid, but his cockeyed reasoning at least puts in question what today we take for granted.

 

Work stole my soul

for twenty-odd years,

broke my spirit:

I saw myself in others

reduced to a sliver of nothing

 

Submission to an employer is humiliating and most workplaces, because companies are essentially totalitarian hierarchies, thoroughly undemocratic.

 

At twenty, hungry to change jobs,

I end up in a small engineering firm,

Somewhere along the River Tyne..

The owner of this grease mountain..

..asks how I find his place…

I say, ‘awful’.

 

On my way to work at the Mercantile Dry Dock,

A goat is tethered to a metal stake..

I was that goat far too long..

 

Kelly’s attitude to employment is disillusioned. He betrays none of the careerism we are supposed to see as the source of fulfilment, nor does he embrace that compensatory pride in being praised by the boss which is the retreat of so many from the demeaning nature of the relationship. He is always clear-eyed about its essential moral failure. The core of his work is moral repulsion at the reduction of employees to mere labour. In keeping with this, his style is simple and straightforward.

The collection opens with a page drawn from the minutes of Jarrow Council, 1957, declaring the houses in Hope St unfit for habitation and recording the occupations of its inhabitants in 1939. Next come two prose pieces about his family’s time in the street and their move to a council house in the late ‘50s:

 

Here the women laid out the dead, brought bairns to life and knocked on the doors of the lonely…

 

Of course, the living conditions are a function of employment, as are all the social relations evoked in the poems.

 

DAD

 

was sitting on the settee in the living room.

I took off his socks, revealing one foot

with two toes missing..

 

The prose section has five pieces in which a riveter, a welder, a shipwright, a fitter and club doorman speak of their lives. These men of the Tyne have pride in their work, as everyone should. The first four believe their trade is the indispensable one. They are amusing, witty, down-to-earth, humane. Their lives have been defined by their work and their work has been done as employees. Kelly respects their testimony through his strong, unadorned style.

 

Kelly is a north-east writer to his marrow. The rhythms of his writing are those of his people. He has eschewed fashionability to bear witness to their experience; but working people from the north-east are peripheral in the London, south-east, money-and-status dominated culture. He has made a brave choice and this collection is a fine addition to his body of work which deserves to be read widely but may have to wait for a more dispassionate posterity to give it its due.

 

 

Review from Alan Dent

MQB

July 3, 2024