Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 94
ISBN: 9781781727546
Publication date: July 8, 2024
Price: £10.99
Winner of the Society of Authors Arthur Welton Award
Winner of the Holyer an Gof Award for Poetry
As featured on Radio 4 Open Country
Radio 4 Poetry Extra Book of the Month November 2024
“This is poetry of incredible bravery, of endurance and of an ongoing vulnerability.” – Daljit Nagra, Poetry Extra
“Each poem rolls in and out like the sea and refreshes like a wild swim.” – Roger Robinson
‘Uncommon, image-rich beauty…’ – The Yorkshire Times
“Bright, brilliant imagery, often gloriously camp and kitsch… By focusing intensely on place, Katrina Naomi is able to push at the horizons of freedom, self and risk…” – Ellora Sutton, Mslexia
‘Tender, fierce and brave…’ – Edge of the World Bookshop Book of the Month
‘A marvel and a solace…’ – Judy Darley
In Battery Rocks, Katrina Naomi returns to the Cornish swimming spot – Battery Rocks in Penzance – every day for a year. On each swim, she finds something fresh and invigorating.
Exploring the sea in all its mercurial forms, Naomi questions the world through the lens of nature and the more than human. Poems like ‘And if there were no sea?’, which recognises both the power and danger of the sea, as well as all that would be lost if it didn’t exist, approach the climate emergency from aslant, offering a new take on one of the most pressing concerns of our times.
Naomi also examines issues of fear, strength and vulnerability, writing in response to an attempted rape and other experienced attacks. She questions how she can feel safer alone, in a raging sea in winter, in nothing but a swimming costume, than on dry land. In poems like ‘The Sea Speaks’ and ‘i.m. Sarah Everard’, the risks of swimming are juxtaposed with the dangers on shore for women.
Battery Rocks revels in friendship, love and community. The Cornish language and landscape are deeply entwined, and Naomi deftly experiments with poems in Kernewek (Cornish) and English. The collection ends in the strange beauty of ‘in the kelp forest’, winner of the prestigious Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. Finding joy through immersion in nature, Battery Rocks is a thoughtful meditation on nature, risk, swimming and the sea.
Katrina Naomi
Katrina Naomi received an Authors’ Foundation Award from the Society of Authors for work on her third collection, Wild Persistence. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths College. Katrina’s recent work has been broadcast on Radio 4’s Front Row, Poetry Please, BBC TV Spotlight and on Poems on the Underground. Her second poetry collection, The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, published by Seren (2016), was chosen by Foyles Bookshop as one of its Foyles’ Five for Poetry. She was the first writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, W Yorks. Her recent pamphlets include Typhoon Etiquette, (Verve Poetry Press) published following an Arts Council-funded trip to Japan, Same But Different with Helen Mort (Hazel Press), which won a Saboteur Award, and An Alfoxden Journal with Sara Hudston (Hazel Press). She was highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prize for Poetry.
Katrina has been poet in residence at the Arnolfini, and at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales where she wrote a sequence on the Suffragettes, published by Rack Press as Hooligans. Her debut collection The Girl with the Cactus Handshake received an Arts Council Award and was shortlisted for the London New Poetry Award. Her pamphlet Lunch at the Elephant & Castle won the 2008 Templar Poetry Pamphlet Competition and her pamphlet Charlotte Brontë’s Corset was published to acclaim by the Brontë Society. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, a tutor for Arvon and Ty Newydd, and runs Poetry Surgeries for the Poetry Society. She is published by The TLS, The Spectator, The Poetry Review and Poetry Wales. She received an award from the Royal Literary Fund in 2014 for her writing. She enjoys performing her poetry and collaborating with visual artists, musicians and film-makers. She is originally from Margate and lives in Cornwall.
Katrina’s fourth poetry collection, Battery Rocks, winner of the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors, is forthcoming in July 2024.
“Battery Rocks immerses the reader in every aspect of the Cornish ocean, but also manages to deftly and powerfully engage with the pleasure and risk of being human.”
Jonathan Davidson, Under the Radar
“…the sea is ally, lover, life, an extension of herself… You don’t have to be a swimmer to enjoy this collection. Naomi uses the metaphor of the sea to write about fragility and strength, viewed through the female lens.”
Louise Warren, London Grip
“This is poetry of incredible bravery, of endurance and of an ongoing vulnerability… Katrina’s dazzling formal play and a tone of compassion makes for a dazzling read.”
Daljit Nagra, Radio 4 Poetry Extra
Outdoor Swimmer Magazine
“Katrina Naomi finds fascinating ways to … ask the big questions… She achieves this with compassion, kindness and humour.”
Daljit Nagra
“In these salt-soaked, wind-swept poems, Katrina Naomi explores wild swimming as an act of resistance, of persistence, as a type of prayer.”
Kim Moore
“With this powerful new collection Katrina Naomi becomes one of the foremost poetic voices of her generation. Her poems combine colloquial and formal energies in their linguistic reach. Vulnerability and feistiness, love, grief, tenderness, are grounded here in experience, and engage with the reader at every level. This is a collection of accomplished register, of relish for life, shot through with awareness of human vulnerability.”
Penelope Shuttle
Katrina Naomi reads her poem ‘in the kelp forest’, winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry
