Tom Kelly in These Are My Bounds explores his working-class life on Tyneside yesteryear and today. This is his second collection of poems and prose, and his fourteenth publication by Red Squirrel Press in its twentieth anniversary year.

 

Reviews of Walking My Streets, poetry and prose collection, 2024:

 

‘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.’

 

—MQB, Summer 2024

 

‘Not merely memoirs of Kelly’s childhood or his first employment, it does all of this, but captures his Tyneside roots, particularly where he was raised: Jarrow, “Jarra”. A poetic line of one paragraph piece welcomed me to the book, “I watch streetlight semaphore me as older children run dizzyingly around the fading green lamp post...” It evoked my own early memories. A true welcome to read on. His last sentence explains Kelly’s motivations as I felt in reading this book. “I was reminded of what Maggie said, ‘Me father could not read nor write’. I am writing this for Ellen, Maggie and me.”’

 

—North East History, Vol. 55, 2024

 

‘Kelly is a keen observer of people and is able to capture their essence. The language is everyday but subtle so that, even when we laugh (and there is much laughter in these pieces), we are keenly aware of the sadness beneath, but it's not the sadness of the characters so much as the sadness we feel for lives which are, in so many ways, wasted.’

 

—British Theatre Guide

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