Tom Kelly is a Jarrow-born poet, short story writer, playwright and lyricist now living happily further up the Tyne at Blaydon. Walking My Streets explores in prose and poetry Kelly’s life and the changing face of his native north-east of England. This is his first collection of poems and prose and thirteenth book published by Red Squirrel Press.

 

Reviews of This Small Patch, poetry collection:

 

‘This is poetry as archaeology and conservation, an exegi  monumentum not to the poet himself but to the community he’s part of, and all the better for that.’

 

—Tears in the Fence

 

‘The general tone is often redolent of the charmingly flat delivery to be found in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Boston Evening Transcript’ (one of my favourite poems by Eliot) or that of John Ashbery’s ‘The Instruction Manual’. To maintain such a style, lines in Kelly that might be deemed ‘poetic’ are resolutely tethered to the quotidian.’

 

—The Lake

 

‘Tom Kelly writes poems that are straightforward and about the people and the places he’s known all his life. The North-East is his “small patch” and its history and traditions loom large in just about everything he writes. If the term “regional writer” means anything it certainly applies to a writer like Kelly. You can see and smell and hear both the past and the present as you read the short, jabbing lines with their penny-plain words.’

 

—The Penniless Press

 

Review of No Love Rations, short-story collection:

 

‘He writes in a simple style, sometimes in the dialect of his native north-east. What he writes about should never be forgotten, though the rich and the powerful do their best to expunge it from collective memory.’

 

—MQB

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