The Wrong Jarrow

Jarrow was once called The Town That Was Murdered. It is still a painful site of popular memory, a shameful emblem of industrial decay and deprivation, immortalised by grainy newsreels, the photographs of Bill Brandt and the speeches of Ellen Wilkinson. Tom Kelly has lived in Jarrow for most of his life, but he sometimes feels as though he is living in the wrong Jarrow, as though the ghosts of the past cannot leave the place. The Wrong Jarrow brings together poems from Tom Kelly's previous books, Their Lives, The Picture from Here, That Time of Life and John Donne in Jarrow as well as new work. It is a clear-eyed picture of the North East today, where deprivation and unemployment are supposedly a distant memory. It also includes a sequence of poems inspired by the paintings of Norman Cornish, charting the life and times of a working class community, something this collection achieves with passion and honesty.