The Way the Crocodile Taught Me E-Book

Katrina Naomi

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 34

Beschreibung

"I love The Way the Crocodile Taught Me for Katrina Naomi's cool voice and fierce eye. For her humour and compassion. For her cast of colourful characters: from a cross-dressing step-father to the Kray twins and a dubious lama. For the journey she takes us – from a childhood a lesser poet would have milked for its sob-stuff to a pass high in the Annapurna mountains where, taking the lama's blessing for her dead mother, she allows her emotion to pour out in a passage all the more moving because of her previous reticence." – Vicki Feaver "These are fiercely and triumphantly female poems, recording in sensuous detail the objects, clothes, emotions of a difficult childhood, recalling her departed father, her mother's men, the hated step-father. They are written with brave truth. It's a vivid collection of elegy and celebration." – Gillian Clarke The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is the eagerly awaited new poetry collection by Katrina Naomi. In it she reveals a childhood fraught with family dislocation, upsets and even occasional violence, and finds, through her art, moments of grace, humour and redemption.

Leseprobe

The Way the

Crocodile

Taught Me

For Melissa and Tim

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

www.serenbooks.com

facebook.com/SerenBooks

twitter@SerenBooks

The right of Katrina Naomi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Katrina Naomi 2016

ISBN: 978-1-78172-331-9

ebook: 978-1-78172-332-6

Kindle: 978-1-78172-333-3

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

Cover image illustration by Gianna Pergamo.www.pergamopapergoods.com

Printed in Bembo by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow.

Author Website:www.katrinanaomi.co.uk

Contents

I

2 Edinburgh Walk

Memory, (Margate 1969)

The Romantic

My Parents’ Poem

Yellow Dahlias

Poems after my Step-father

Meeting my Fathers

The Fight Before my Sister’s Wedding

Pop Socks and Manicures

Portrait of my Step-father as a Xmas Tree

Willpower

Step-father Graph

Self-portrait with Top Hat

Leopard Print Coat

Whistle

The Red Room

Letter to my Mother

Boredom: An Appreciation

Poems after my Nan

Family Dentist

Two Aprons

What Nan Said

Her Advice After my Partner’s Breakdown

Gin and Ice Cream

The Woman on the Sideboard

Another Planet

Elsie

Full Strength

At my Sister’s

II

The Woman who Married the Berlin Wall

Bearskin

Breakfast at the New Hampshire Motel

The Bicycle

On the Shore

Fledgling

Bestial

Concrete Overcoat

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me

September

We are All Saying Nothing

And Mandy Talks of Kyrgyzstan

Wolf on a Hillside

Comfort Me with Apples

The History Teacher

The Bear

The Woman Who Walks Naked

III

Mantra

Acknowledgements

I

2 Edinburgh Walk

A crazy pattern on the kitchen tiles,

each one scorched

with the curved ship of an iron,

its steam of holes oh oh ohing

on the orange glaze.

Mum frenzied with a brillo pad

at the former tenant’s gift.

We lived with their jilted art

then looked on past

to the square of garden

where one day, Mum promised,

we’d have a swing.

Memory, (Margate 1969)

My father is muffled he stands

away from my sister and I We wear

identical hats halos of synthetic fur

tied with pom poms He holds his new camera

The sun is low level with my eyes

We stand on grass just in front of the cliffs

He shouts in the wind says it several times

Finally I understand we are to smile

I stretch the muscles of my cheeks they touch the fur

I don’t know if my sister smiles she is so far below me

He jokes about stepping back I know I would die

I stay where I am take my sister’s small mitten in mine

The Romantic

After my father left, I grew

a battery of hearts,

felt each of them beat,

like doves in a casket

before their release. You might imagine

the sheen of the good heart.

I rarely picture the razor wire heart,

its zest and sting.

If I say my hearts have never been

broken, or fissured, or ruptured,

that’s not entirely true.

Still, I want my faults intact.

And the barbs of the heart that loved my father jut

as if from a pike’s lower lip,

the war of rust leaking;

a child’s heart,

no larger than a grenade.

My Parents’ Poem

won’t be set in couplets,

certainly won’t rhyme.

I’ll let you guess the refrain,

his envoi,

after a volley of verbs.

It will be Hughesian, Plathian,

well, from that era. It will be brief,

yet I won’t understand it all.

A work of juvenilia,

their poem will try to marry certain ideals.

It will be written in the past tense

by another woman.

Yellow Dahlias

This is the image that sticks:

my married mother, her costume cut

low and high, one foot below

the impossible blue of a honeymoon pool,

the other poised on the metal step;