The Way the Crocodile Taught Me

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Friday Poem – ‘The Romantic’ by Katrina Naomi

This week’s Friday Poems is ‘The Romantic’ by Katrina Naomi from her collection The Way the Crocodile Taught Me. Katrina recently won first place in the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize with her poem ‘in the kelp forest’. Watch the winner announcement and listen to a recording of Katrina’s poem on the Keats-Shelly Association website.

This cover shows an illustration of a woman in 1950s style dress and a crocodile head standing with her hands in the air.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is a heartfelt and tragi-comic portrayal of a fraught childhood and adolescence. Central to the book are two sequences: one about a quick-tempered stepfather – a 17-stone brute, “mostly in a temper”, and the other about a kindly but also comically old-fashioned grandmother.

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.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Katrina’s most recent collection Wild Persistence is also available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Guest Post – Katrina Naomi: One week in

Today we have a guest post from poet Katrina Naomi who shares some of the things she has been doing to keep positive during this strange time.

One week in

It’s been a week since I had to abandon a holiday at my sister’s to come back home to Cornwall. Like most people, I’m still trying to get my head around what’s happening, and the situation shifts every day. I have a collection, Wild Persistence, coming out with Seren on 1 June, although the date for this might change.

Everything is changing, everything is uncertain. It’s the uncertainty that I – and many others – am finding so hard.

A few days back, I don’t mind admitting I had a major wobble. I was tearful when I wrote first thing and I found myself crying while making soup at lunchtime. It was the day when the first (or maybe second or third, it’s hard to keep track) restrictions came in. I was worried about money – all my income comes from poetry – and I was missing seeing friends. All the losses started to pile up.

Walking usually helps me find some sort of balance. I went out for a walk with my partner that afternoon. We walked in woods and fields near our home in Penzance, I sat by a stream, listened to jackdaws and watched two heifers jostle with each other. I sat for about 10, maybe 15 minutes, and I felt better, not brilliant, but better. We came home and I decided to paint the walls – it was that or climb them. I’ve done a lot of painting since – the stairs, the mouldy bits in the kitchen and bathroom. I’ve enjoyed having another focus and felt more positive – and reminded myself that I have my health and partner and so many other wonderful things in my life.

In a more positive frame of mind, I’ve been developing some sort of routine for my days. I’ve been telling myself that uncertainty is a useful thing for poetry. I never sit down to write a poem having any idea where it’s going to go, I have to allow the poem to happen and trust where my subconscious, odd ideas, bits of film, overhead conversations, and pen, take me. Of course, not every poem goes anywhere and that’s also fine. I’m trying to develop this more open attitude towards life and where it’s going to take me – and take all of us – in the week and months to come. But a routine still feels helpful and here’s what I’ve set up for myself. It can change, it might have to change, depending on how things go:

I’ve been reading poetry and writing first thing. The resulting poems are dire but I don’t mind. I’m just glad to be writing. Then I walk for a couple of hours. This week, we’ve had a really low tide, so I’ve been walking from Penzance harbour towards Marazion on the sand, all the way. Yesterday I walked with a good friend, keeping our distance, we had to shout to each other in the wind – it’s often windy in West Cornwall. After lunch, I’ve been doing emails, checking proofs and – before things tightened down – going on another walk around teatime, usually around the harbour and through the near-deserted town. I come home and do some yoga, eat and read. In the evenings, I’ve been talking to friends on the phone, reading novels and dancing to the radio in the freshly-painted kitchen. Thank you to my local library and Radio 6 Music.

Katrina Naomi

Katrina Naomi’s first collection The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is available on our website: £9.99

Join the Seren book club and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from our website.

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Katrina Naomi shares her poetry advice

This week’s poetry advice blog comes from Katrina Naomi author of The Way the Crocodile Taught Me. Katrina is a poet, tutor, critic, mentor and translator who lives in Cornwall. Her poetry has appeared on Radio 4’s Front Row and Poetry Please, BBC TV’s Spotlight and is currently included in London’s Poems on the Underground. Her next collection is forthcoming in 2020.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Katrina NaomiThe Way the Crocodile Taught Me, is a vibrant, heartfelt and tragi-comic collection of poetry. With warmth, flair and a certain ferocious wit, Naomi tears into her subject matter: a childhood fraught with family dislocation, upsets and even occasional violence, and finds, through her art, moments of grace, humour and redemption. It will delight people who know Naomi’s work and undoubtedly win new fans for her courageous and unabashedly entertaining poems.

What first drew you to poetry?

I came to poetry by mistake. I was trying to write about something I really cared about and found that I’d written a poem.

Where do you look to for inspiration?

Art, walking, film and other poets.

What poets or writers inspire you?

There’s so many! One poet who always inspires me is Peter Redgrove.

How do you balance writing poetry with working? If you write full time, what made you decide to do so?

I do write full time, I found that when I was working in my former human rights job, that I was spending longer and longer lunch breaks writing poems. Something had to give. I thought I’d take voluntary redundancy and see if I could get anywhere with my poetry. That year I won a poetry competition and was published soon afterwards. So I’ve kept going.

How do you prepare yourself before sitting down to write?

I usually read another poetry collection for about 20 minutes, or I copy out a poem that I really admire. This gets me to slow down and really look and think.

What methods do you use to overcome feeling disheartened or to keep positive?

I talk to my partner or close friends when I’ve had a disappointment. Also, I often write about the disappointment and see if I can turn it into some other beast. That helps!

 

Katrina’s collection The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

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Friday Poem – ‘Letter to my Mother’, Katrina Naomi

Friday Poem Letter to my Mother Katrina Naomi

We are thrilled that the Society of Authors has just awarded Katrina Naomi an Author’s Foundation grant to help complete work for her second Seren collection, due in 2020. In celebration, our Friday Poem this week is taken from Katrina’s previous book, The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, which we published in 2016.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Katrina Naomi‘Letter to my Mother’ is ripe with anger, sorrow and the burden of time. It is not just the weight of years though, but the physical mass of the speaker’s stepfather that dominates, despite his long-ago death: ‘All these years, his 17 stones/ pressing down on you’.
The poems in The Way the Crocodile Taught Me often confront difficult figures and past trauma with a tragi-comic slant, resulting in intense and intimate portraits that are at once heartbreaking and hilarious. We often find, as in ‘Letters to my Mother’, that interspersed with the awful,  there are moments of contemplation, redemption, realisation.

 

 

Friday Poem Letter to my Mother Katrina Naomi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Claim 20% off every book you buy from us when you create a free Seren account.

 

 

 

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Friday Poem – ‘The Romantic’, Katrina Naomi

Friday Poem The Romantic by Katrina Naomi

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘The Romantic’, from The Way the Crocodile Taught Me by Katrina Naomi, who has just been shortlisted for B O D Y’s ‘Best of the Net’.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is a heartfelt and tragi-comic portrayal of a fraught childhood and adolescence. Central to the book are two sequences: one about a quick-tempered stepfather – a 17-stone brute, “mostly in a temper”, and the other about a kindly but also comically old-fashioned grandmother.
‘The Romantic’ recalls the poet’s lost father, and the deep emotional fissures he left behind.

 

 

Katrina Naomi poem The Romantic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is available from the Seren website: £9.99

Join our free Book Club for 20% off every book you buy from us.

 

 

 

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Friday Poem – ‘Boredom: An Appreciation’, Katrina Naomi

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Katrina Naomi

This week’s Friday Poem is taken from Katrina Naomi’s The Way the Crocodile Taught Me.

‘Boredom: An Appreciation’ perfectly captures the glory of days lazily spent. In stark contrast to the darker themes present in this collection, Katrina Naomi here paints a luxurious portrait of the strange joys mundane activities can provide.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is Katrina Naomi’s second collection, and paints a heartfelt and tragi-comic picture of a fraught childhood and adolescence. The tone of the work is as much tender as turbulent, reflecting the protagonist’s travails. Interspersed with the awful there are moments of humour, of contemplation, redemption, realisation: these are pointed, lively and always entertaining poems.

 

Boredom: An Appreciation

The heavy-shouldered clock of morning,
those slender hands never reaching
past the hours of brown wallpaper.

I don’t have time for boredom now,
to stare at the gas in the fire,
as if I could study flames,

to let my thoughts drift on their thermal,
unharnessed, as if they were never mine –
never could be.

Might I long for a Westgate afternoon,
waiting for the yellow lights
of evening, knowing day had melted –

the dark toffee of it – to listen
to the hiss, the end of the cassette,
re-reading my diary, its brief entries.

And if I sit here long enough,
could I wonder where that jet goes
with its teatime, pinkish trail,

imagine being a passenger,
the tedium of that life,
while I bite the ends of my hair.

 

Buy your copy of The Way the Crocodile Taught Me now: only £4.99 (half price) until 13 January in the Seren January Sale.

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Friday Poem – Yellow Dahlias

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Katrina Naomi

Yesterday saw us at the Admiral Benbow in Penzance for the launch of Katrina Naomi’s The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, and so this week’s Friday Poem is taken from this gorgeous new collection. If you missed Katrina in Penzance, you have another chance to hear her read on 17 May, when we will be at The Yorkshire Grey, London, for a second launch event. You can find the full details on our website.

The Way the Crocodile Taught Me Penzance launch
Katrina Naomi’s book launch, Admiral Benbow, 14 April

the way the crocodile taught meThe Way the Crocodile Taught Me is a heartfelt and tragi-comic portrayal of a fraught childhood and adolescence. Central to the book are two sequences: one about an awful stepfather, and the other about a kindly but also comically old-fashioned grandmother. A mother appears, distant, glamorous as a film star. An absent father is also a dream: “After my father left, I grew/ a battery of hearts,/ felt each of them beat,/ like doves in a casket/”. These family poems are both heartbreaking and often hilarious, sometimes both at once.

 

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;
her face, fresh of make-up,

brows plucked in static surprise,
eyes wide with the rubber pull
of yellow dahlias, her new ring and bracelet.

A triumph. My mother emerging
from the water as I’d never seen her before.
Her head, a belisha beacon of hope.