An Evening of Poetry with Tom Kelly and Ric Hool

Free, booking required

Suitable for all ages

Join Tom and Ric at The Word as they read from their new collections of poetry and short stories.

Tom’s new collection is called Walking My Streets and Ric’s new collection is What the Sand Didn’t Tell the Moon. There will also be an opportunity to ask Tom and Ric any questions you have.

Wed 10 April, 6-7.15pm. Free, booking required

ABOUT TOM KELLY 

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 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.

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 TS 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.’

ABOUT RIC HOOL

Ric Hool has 13 collections of published poetry. He was the Welsh Academy poet for the Abergavenny Food Festival 2009, also Academy poet representative for the London South Bank London Global Poetry System 2009 and has run the reading series Poetry Upstairs in Abergavenny for 30 years.

The first publication of Last Fair Deal Gone Down, a docu-story conflating the lives of the author, seminal blues singer/guitarist Robert Johnson and Eric Clapton, was published in Fulcrum No. 6 (Annual of Poetry & Aesthetics) USA. His poetic themes are the psychological and geographical impact of place, time, and space on the human experience.

Ric Hool is from Northumberland but lives in Wales.

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