Katrina Naomi’s second collection, The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, is remarkable and rewarding. In ‘Memory, (Margate, 1969)’, both the poem’s lines and its subjects are haunted by gaps, between the photographer father and his children, high on cliffs, then between the children, the younger ‘so far below me’. Yet there is a final assertion of kindness. The speaker, who, the cover suggests, is Naomi herself, takes ‘my sister’s small mitten in mine’.

The very next poem, The Romantic, opens simply: ‘After my father left’. It ends with the threat of explosion: ‘a child’s heart, / no larger than a grenade’. But the book maintains a bleak clarity, terse as the closing of lips. Naomi keeps exceptional control over exceptionally distressing material. Her family poems work through considered force of content, rather than seductive sound or irresistible rhythm. She refuses to find harmonious words for discordant life. ‘My Parents’ Poem’ ‘certainly won’t rhyme’.

Life delivers a brutal, cross-dressing stepfather, hated even in the grave: ‘his 17 stones / pressing down on you, crushing / the soil between you’ (‘Letter to my Mother’). In ‘Poems after my Nan’, a beloved grandmother dies hard: ‘They’ve taken my teeth; I can still spit / and scratch’. This is violent simplicity with power in its verbs; the active poetry of people who never stop resisting. Some of the varied speakers in the collection’s central section prove horrific. ‘The History Teacher’, who longs to work in an abattoir, sees his class as ‘dumb animals’.

But the poems also speak out. In ‘Yellow Dahlias’ the abused mother is imagined in her honeymoon swimming cap ‘as I’d never seen her before. / Her head, a belisha beacon of hope’. The throb of alliteration is a device Naomi permits herself. Her careful phrases reveal her deep respect for her subjects. Her grandmother’s funeral arrangements are described, in ‘Full Strength’, as ‘all possibly what she’d have wanted’. With bitter wit, in ‘What Nan Said’, Naomi tells ‘Nan’, who thought her ‘above your station’, ‘I'm still the same girl, la même’.

‘Mantra’, the final brave and absorbing poem of Naomi’s collection, is an account of tying a garland, for her mother, to prayer flags on a mountain. The poem’s energetic physical descriptions hint at rebirth. Its long pulsing lines are a release of feeling after the book’s long control: ‘It was safe to cry then’. Naomi is no longer the child of “Memory’, trapped on the cliff top. She descends:

                                                                to sweet gineger tea. Mum stayed,
repeating her mantra to the mountains, for six months, maybe a year,
before the cord unravelled, and then she’d be free.

Crikey pepper as my grandad used to say (a child-friendly version of Christ Almighty, I believe) – what a story. Katrina Naomi tells us about her fraught childhood and adolescence in a tumble of brilliant poems using different styles, rhythms and structures.

It’s her second collection after the admired The Girl with the Cactus Handshake and the award -winning writer and teacher has used her unusual background as the inspiration for a poetic biography encompassing family fissures and psychological stresses.

There are unfamiliar personal references along with others that jolt our own memories – Kouros aftershave, Youth Dew perfume, her nan having all her teeth removed as a 21st birthday gift (as did my own grandma), fake fur, popsocks. Her memories of her mum, her dad, her 17-stone cross-dressing stepdad with a love of fried-egg sarnies, the heartbreak of a shared grave, her nan’s tough but sensible advice.

These are hard poems to quote from selectively but I was especially moved by ‘The Bicycle’ (about the aftermath of a sexual assault), ‘Bearskin’ (a soldier missing his former life and his estranged children), ‘Concrete Overcoat’ (a horrible riff on the Krays), the astonishing ‘The History Teacher’ and  the chilling ‘Wolf on a Hillside’. I will quote one in its entirety:

     ‘The Woman Who Walks Naked’

     sweeps her hair into a bun, soon she’ll lop it off, anything to feel

     that burn on her neck – the sun’s gentle strangle.

     She crosses the yard, her shadow tight, clangs the roasting gate,

     forces her legs through the soup of midday – the heat glad

     to get hold of her shoulders, feel the greasy sway of her breasts.

     Nobody’s in the field, the land, the square. She scoops an armful

     from the fountain over her back for the sun to sting dry.

     Village dogs scoot towards her, sniffing her shins.

     It’s when she passes the café that the shout goes up.

This is a stunning collection.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me by Katrina Naomi, Spacecraft by John Mcculloch and Chan by Hannah Lowe

Review by Richie McCaffery

All three of these collections happen to be the follow-up books to widely critically lauded first collections, which puts them all also in a dangerous territory. Will each poet cement the reputation they gained with the first book, develop their voice in new ways or perhaps produce something that is secondary to that first collection?

On first reading, I was most drawn towards Katrina Naomi’s style. It feels to me the most accessible here – there is a condensed lyrical intensity to these poems and they are unafraid to make big dramatic disclosures to the reader. The problem step-father looms oppressively over the collection – we’re reminded on multiple occasions of his weight (‘17 stones’) and how he beat the speaker’s mother. The whole book reads in an elegiac light – an elegy for the speaker’s mother foremost, but also the speaker’s nan – and there’s an element of truth and reconciliation to the poems – that an anger has given way to a forgiveness of sorts:

… I can’t talk to you,
knowing he’s also there, listening,

…

All these years, his 17 stone
pressing down on you, crushing
the soil between you.
… I forgive you,
as I always have. I forgive you
for marrying him.

(from ‘Letter to my Mother’)

Though it’s less noticeable than in Lowe’s collection, there’s a clear narrative arc to these poems and the way they’re ordered. We begin with a few poems that hint at something foreboding, but are largely domestic vignettes of a sort of early happiness. For instance, in ‘2 Edinburgh Walk’ the young speaker is given the promise of a swing but we’re also made aware of the ‘jilted art’ (wonderful phrase!) of previous tenants in the form of burn marks from an iron on the kitchen floor. In ‘Memory, (Margate 1969)’ we’re given the most fleeting glimpse of nostalgia, but it’s also undercut with the threat of death. The speaker’s real father is taking a picture at the seaside and the family are posing, on the cusp of things about to fall apart:

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.

After that, things do fall apart, the father leaves and in come a succession of inept and often cruel step-fathers ending with the ‘17 stone’ tyrant. We hear how the speaker, after her father left, had to grow ‘a battery of hearts’ and that:

… the barbs of the heart that loved my father jut
as if from a pike’s lower lip,
…
a child’s heart
                        no larger than a grenade.

(from ‘The Romantic’)

Thereafter the speaker seeks solace and understanding in her nan and this gives rise to a long sequence of memories and elegies for her. However, even this is not simply wistful recollection – the poems unflinchingly chart her own decline in often searing and upsetting ways. And it’s here we are given the briefest hint that the speaker’s mother is dying of cancer. Thereafter, in the later sections the poems seem to lose focus somewhat and I don’t mean this as a criticism – the poet seems dramatically displaced and at a loss, looking around at the world for some sort of meaning. It’s easy to see how this fragmentation could happen, in harrowing poems like ‘The Bicycle’ where we are only given snippets of contexts but enough traumatic information to understand that a rape has taken place and the victim must pick themselves up and try to get back home on a bike they are too shaken and injured to ride. In ‘The History Teacher’ we learn of a butcher working as a history teacher who must censor the bloody parts from history for the sake of his class. This makes us as, readers of this frank and revealing collection, feel privileged. The book comes back to the theme of forgiveness in the long closing poem ‘Mantra’ where the speaker undertakes a spiritual odyssey, although the speaker’s belief in the hereafter is clearly absent.