Poetry in Herons: Katrina Naomi

For our July monthly poetry reading, we are delighted to Katrina Naomi, author of Battery Rocks.

Free entry. Come for the poetry. Stay for the poetry.

Arrive at 5pm. We’ll offer you something fizzy. Usually a drink but perhaps one day it will be a sherbet fountain.

5.10-5.40ish, we’ll enjoy some poetry.

5.40-6pm, finish the fizzy things and perhaps buy the poet’s books.

Some seating. Some standing. Get in touch with us about any requirements you may have.

It is free and unticketed but it would help if you let us know that you are coming. RSVP to read@heronbooks.co.uk

Katrina is an award-winning poet and performer. Her fourth poetry collection, Battery Rocks, (Seren, 2024) is the winner of the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors. Katrina’s previous collections have won an Authors’ Foundation Award and Saboteur Award; she is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize and has twice been highly commended in the Forward Prize. Katrina’s poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Open Country and Poetry Please, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths and tutors for Arvon and the Poetry School. Katrina lives in Cornwall. www.katrinanaomi.co.uk

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.