THESE ARE MY BOUNDS : POEMS AND PROSE

By Tom Kelly

Red Squirrel Press. 74 pages. £12. ISBN 978-1913-63269-4

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Tom Kelly is from the North-East, a fact that is obvious from the contents of this book, and from his earlier collections of poetry and short stories. Unlike a lot of poets these days, who like to travel and write about what they see and experience in other places, Kelly has stayed rooted in where he was born, finding most of his material close to hand in the lives and activities of the people he grew up and worked with all his life. A life that was typical of his time: “I left school with no qualifications/just turned fifteen/hitting the great big world/with absolutely nothing”.

The language is direct, conversational, and uses the common parlance of the everyday to good effect. His father, passing a pub, remarks, “I wouldn’t throw me cap in there”. The style could be described as functional, though that might refer to a neat way of getting the reader to focus on what is being said : “Hear the MP opening another foodbank/the declamatory style self-congratulating to the full house./Listen to him spinning half-truths, lies./Turn off the sound, watch his yawning mouth”. 

It’s an easily-identifiable world that is seen in the poems, and from that point of view some might ask why employ a poem to point to the obvious? Well, there may be a tendency to take the obvious for granted until it’s too late to do anything about it. Foodbanks have become part of the landscape of contemporary Britain. In another poem, Kelly tells the sad story of “a quiet man” with no family who, when his disability benefit was cut, committed suicide: “Seems he had taken all he could/tablets were the last resort”. A poem can be effective in drawing attention to a tragedy.

Somewhat in a different key, and moving to the North-West there is a longer poem about the painter L.S. Lowry (“I was a rent man for forty odd years;/I’ve met real fears and crocodile tears./I drew while I collected on my round,/ ‘Next week’s not good enough, I want a pound’ “). At the risk of being hounded by irate enthusiasts for his paintings, I’ve never been carried away by most of his work, but Kelly’s poem is well worth reading and does seem to honestly sum up Lowry’s life.

These poems should be read alongside the prose pieces capturing the dedication to football (“I Left My Heart in Roker Park”) and the forgotten writings of an old man (“Listen, there is a Telephone ringing in an Empty House, Demolished years ago”), plus an encounter with someone in a pub who, the narrator senses, that for “all his talk there was a stone lodged in his heart”. They evoke the urban society that Kelly writes about so convincingly . And its past. The title of another piece, “Don’t let me Die in the Workhouse,” brings in memories of the fear of ending one’s days in an institution that seemed so near and real to the working-class poor. Younger people may wonder what it meant, but I’m old enough to have known people for whom it had been a possibility. In the same way I can recognise the scene when, in his poems, Kelly talks about “two up, two down houses” and  “gas mantles”. My own childhood comes flooding back.

The best way to read These Are My Bounds is not as a series of individual pieces, but as a whole. In that way, what can sometimes appear to be fragmentary and anecdotal takes on extra meaning. As with what is remembered or described, there is a bringing together that becomes a broad view of a too-often overlooked or forgotten world.