Charlotte Brontë’s Corset

   
Published in April 2010 by the Brontë Society, Katrina Naomi’s pamphlet, Charlotte Brontë’s Corset, is available from Katrina directly or from the  Brontë Society on 01535 640188 or at www.bronte.info.
 
 
“Charlotte Brontë’s Corset is sensitive, sometimes provocative, its non-reverential tone wry and refreshing. Katrina’s almost ‘forensic’ examination of the Brontë relics explores them through new eyes, challenging our over-familiarity with the Brontë myths. Yet she is also drawn to the present life of the Parsonage, and her poems vividly re-imagine life behind the scenes of a museum dedicated to literary genius.”
 
Jenna Holmes, Brontë Parsonage Museum
 
 
 
 
Anne’s Last Letter
 
(dated 5 April 1849 to Miss [Ellen] Nussey)
 
 
Such clear handwriting, as though etched
with a fine Berol in brown ink. To save paper,
 
she wrote across the page, turned it 90 degrees,
I hold Anne’s letter (last valued at £180,000)
 
in its folder of thick plastic. I daren’t touch
the original for fear I’d start to cough, my lungs
 
in revolt. I have no horror of death she writes,
God’s will be done. I have no religion and want
 
to live. Though Anne is my favourite, I won’t bring
her letter to my face, lick this pricey envelope.
 
 
 
Overnighter at the Brontë Parsonage Museum
 
I’m not stupid,
I’ve danced with the sensors,
know who takes a break
from the tedium of security.
 
Once the last of the chatter
has broken away, I burrow
behind the Victorian frills
of Reverend Brontë’s bed.
 
I wait for the metal concertina
of shutter to wince its way
to the boards, for the clatter
of court heels on the setts,
 
for their exhausts to breathe.
I can relax, saunter to the kitchen,
make that kettle angry for tea.
I take my steaming meal through
 
to the Reverend’s room, stab
my sausages with his two-
pronged fork, sup my beer
from two dainty glasses. I write
 
for as long as my candle permits,
take myself to the only decent bed,
put on that stained white nightgown,
place his cap upon my head.
 
There’s no Cathy at the window
and I dream of bad-boy Branwell.
 
 
 
from Charlotte Brontë’s Corset

Visit Katrina’s website.
 
Visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Brontë Society website.

Katrina Naomi’s The Girl with the Cactus Handshake

Katrina Naomi

  
Katrina Naomi’s first full collection, The Girl with the Cactus Handshake (Templar Poetry, 2009) has just been shortlisted for the London Fringe Festival New Poetry Award 2010. During 2009/10, she was the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s first writer-in-residence; a pamphlet, Charlotte Brontë’s Corset, was published by the Brontë Society in April 2010. Katrina was shortlisted for the 2009 Bridport Prize and was runner-up in the Poetry Society’s 2009 Stanza Competition. In 2008/9 she received an Arts Council England Writer’s Award. Katrina won the 2008 Templar Poetry Competition with her pamphlet Lunch at the Elephant & Castle and recently received a Hawthornden Fellowship. She has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths (University of London) and teaches creative writing for the Open University and poetry online at Exeter University. Katrina was brought up in Margate and lives in south London.
 
 

  
“This impressive collection is rich with colour, black comedy, and surprise. Katrina Naomi’s inventive work locates a ‘beauty, a balance in watching’ as it explores unusual lives at key moments. These are poems as eye-opening, twisted fictions, in which B-movie girls, clairvoyants, sailors, psychobilly rockers, and lonely zookeepers feed their desires as best they can. This captivating book offers a riotously imaginative landscape – sometimes lush, sometimes prickly, and often rooted in delicious noir. Naomi’s version of pastoral is not one you’ll soon shake off.”

– Todd Swift
 
 
“Katrina Naomi’s poems are fresh and surprising – they’re user-friendly, willing to link arms with you, but then they tug you along in unlikely directions. With their sharp diction, salt tang, blend of dark and light, and their unexpected last lines, these are satisfying pieces which dock in the memory.”
 
– Roddy Lumsden
 
 
“Katrina Naomi’s poems take off from an eerily familiar inner-urban childhood and spiky estuary-hinterland adolescence, to explore, among other unlikely destinations, Brassai’s Parisian underworld, pre-Castro Cuba, ice-bound Newfoundland: daring flights shadowed with edgy, deep, intimate foreboding.”
 
– Anne-Marie Fyfe
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The New World
 
I live in Ana’s caravan,
strew it with poppies and moss.
She adds cornflowers, cow parsley,
liking colour, greens and blues.
I position the van towards the moon.
 
She’ll sleep here
or in the woods.
I can never be sure,
but if it’s a night when she’s playing
with wolves, I undo the latch
 
and sew. I cover her bed
in Kente cloth and matted grass,
find a pink Formica table
from a seaside café that’s selling up,
place it by the window,
 
so she can paint the stars
by numbers. I leave her
offerings of a bamboo bar,
a solar-powered record player,
scratched jazz.
 
I love to watch her dance,
how quetzals lift her step,
lizards pull her to the ground.
I cook a dish of cacti,
leave it steaming at her feet.
 
 
 
Bar Girl, Havana, 1954
 
It’s that time of night when
my earrings pinch like clams,
when my tulle net skirt itches.
Even the Cristal is flat.
 
Scarcely a customer.
They’re all at the Tropicana,
where I’m barred.
No manager takes what he wants, but
 
it’s 3 am and Ernesto waits for me
to finish this beer,
my knuckles slumped
under my eyebrows.
 
My tab’s running over,
I need to clean this dress,
find more lipstick, fix my hair.
People say there’ll be a revolution.
 
 
 
from The Girl with the Cactus Handshake (Templar Poetry, 2009)
 
Order The Girl with the Cactus Handshake. 
 
Visit Katrina’s website.