Tom Kelly
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About Tom Kelly | Two poems | Reviews
ISBN 978-0-9554027-4-6
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Tom's work, produced by the Customs House, includes his most recent, critically acclaimed, play, Nothing like the Wooden Horse (text published by Red Squirrel); Baby Love; Family Ties; Five By One; I Left My Heart In Roker Park (staged three times); Secrets; Love in NE32; Ride A White Swan (staged twice); Behind the Wall; Autumn Days; and the musicals Dan Dare with music by John Miles and Tom & Catherine (with Ray Spencer) music once again by John Miles, which was staged twice and sold-out on both occasions.
He has written two community plays, Tyne Songs (with Carol Cooke) for South Tyneside MBC and The Black Hill for Blaydon Festival. In addition he wrote The Blaydon Bricklayer for the Workers' Educational Association and has been commissioned to write a new play to celebrate their centenary in October.
His next production is the musical The Machine Gunners, followed by Talking Tom, a collection of his monologues appearing at the Customs House in March before a short regional tour. Tom will be appearing in the production reading some of his highly praised poetry.
In May, choral group Encore will perform concert versions of Tom & Catherine and Dan Dare.
Over the past year he has directed with Gary Wilkinson two film documentaries Little Ireland and Jarrow Voices.
Dreamers in a Cold Climate was Tom Kelly's first poetry collection from Red Squirrel Press. It was followed by Love-Lines and Somewhere in Heaven, and the text of his play Nothing Like the Wooden Horse, which was first produced by the Customs House, South Shields, in March 2009.
"It is a beautiful elegy to work and the industrial working class."
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.
"Tom Kelly's Dreamers in a Cold Climate is deeply rooted in the past and present of Tyneside. The autobiographical trajectory of the first part gives continuity to its multi-faceted treatments of self and place. 'Geordie' follows, a long dramatic monologue, heavily salted with Tyneside dialect. It traces the purposeless, pub-centred driftings of a life formerly given structure and meaning by decades of work in the now-defunct shipyards. The passing of heavy industry and the local identity it shaped are inextricably linked to the social, cultural, and psychological dereliction embodied in Geordie himself. His dispossession assumes universality, in an age when globalisation's first casualties arc localised traditional industries: 'Now?/ What wi got?/ Bloody bingo and karaoke,/ The Japanese took wa ships/ Giv'us bloody karaoke./ Not much of aa swap...'
"While the past is looked back to for vanished cultural cohesion, the poems drawing on personal experience also evoke a childhood sense of the constraints of an industrial status quo that imposed narrow limits on imagination and opportunity: 'His wants are clagged/ in his mouth,/ clapped shut with ignorance,/ a dry fish trapped in concrete.'
"Kelly's entry into the working life Tyneside had ordained for him is noted in '1964: the Time Office, Mercantile Dry Dock, Jarrow', firmly sealing his connection with Geordie's lost shipbuilding past: 'Now go to the site:/ shipyard, clock, gone...// Take this image:/ ship and men mauling the dock,/ me praying over a ledger.'
"Subsequent poems follow his life far beyond that point, through the deaths of parents and birth of a daughter, to a plateau of cautious lyricism where memory and the present interpenetrate: 'wait/ and/ then recall/ the memory/ that flutters/ like a bird/ in your cupped hands/ flying unsteadily/ painfully away.' The thematic and local integration of Dreamers in a Cold Climate gives the collection something of the unity of a single long poem. Read as such, its impact is impressive."
Douglas Houston, Staple
"Title poem deals with kids who speak when they are spoken to, but don't put themselves forward in class. 'Snow was heavy/ falling on all their hopes' when the husband returned from war to be greeted by the harsh winter of 1947. This is a book of a life, words cut to the quick and the words are transferred to you, the reader. There is an eleven-year-old who hates his Dad, and the gang member who is bullied, his sweets taken, his balls numbed. To tell you more would deprive you of an experience. Get it before it's gone."
Geoff Stevens, Purple Patch, No. 122, March 2009
"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)