Tom Kelly
About Tom Kelly | Two poems: A Letter From James Robert Henderson & Velvet Sleep | Review
ISBN 978-1-906700-04-1
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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.
Love-Lines is Tom Kelly's second poetry collection from Red Squirrel Press, who also publish his Dreamers in a Cold Climate 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.
A Letter From James Robert Henderson
Aboard The Wellesley, on the River Tyne, 14th March, 1907.
Me Mother placed me on this training ship,
she cannit look after me.
Ah'm writing this letter with aa thick black vine,
letters tak' ower th' paper.
Today wi scrubbed th' deck in tha rain,
hands hard with tha' months aa've bin heor.
They tell us ta pray,
aa pray ye'll think of me.
Ya garndfather-to-be, James Robert Henderson,
aged eight, this day.
Velvet Sleep
I want the all day buffet of sleep,
return time and again, without broken dreams.
Then more, a full course meal of eight hours,
uninterrupted snoring.
The duvet tastes so sweet,
good enough to eat,
lie all day.
Don't let me go struggling to your crying cot,
my hand swimming through those wooden bars,
hearing your cry subside as I sleep standing up.
I want to eat, drink, devour sleep,
breakfast, dinner, tea.
I am deprived, crying, whinging in a corner.
I want to throw myself on the floor, curl up,
become a child, yes become you, a baby,
give me your gentle movement, your velvet sleep.
"Kelly's third collection, and his second from the Red Squirrel Press, builds brilliantly upon the themes of his earlier work and resounds with a rawness, pathos, and humour that leaps from the page and seems to whisper charmingly in your ear like an old friend. A proud son of the North East, his poetry is preoccupied with place and loss, with a faultless ear for the nuances of his native Tyneside, picking out the small details of everyday life and making them sing, from memories of awkwardly sharing a urinal with his father to nights spent wistfully looking through photograph albums, gazing at pictures of that 'umbrella the light but stop a long way short of the living'. These are vivid, compelling, and often beautiful poems, by turns sad and uplifting, that certainly deserve a wider readership."
Bulletin, Poetry Book Society magazine, Issue 220, Spring 2009
"The past is a foreign country, wrote LP Hartley. They do things differently there.
"And yet how often we try to smuggle ourselves back across the borders of history and memory.
"Kathleen Kenny's Keening with Spittal Tongues and Tom Kelly's Love-Lines are strong and moving portraits in verse of north-east family life.
"Kenny writes touchingly about the generations of women in her Geordie-Irish family, 'the ones you imagine/in muddled petticoats/and full grey dresses/apple-cheeked/and hot-tempered/running shoeless/in myths of redness.'
"Jarrow-born Kelly writes about the layers of family memory, parents, grand-parents and children, hospitals and funerals, 'the same old story' of unspoken loyalties like a 'loop tape refusing/to snap, spool away.'
"Reading these two books is like looking through someone else's photograph albums containing the complex collective memories and stories, lies and silences that hold a family together.
"'On the one hand there is the common urge to live in the past/when everything was perfect.'
"On the other hand, we sometimes need to 'remember not to remember.'
Andy Croft, Morning Star