Battery Rocks

Description

Winner of the Society of Authors Arthur Welton Award
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.