Katrina Naomi grew up close to the sea in Margate and now lives in Cornwall, where she combines her love of writing with sea swimming and a passion for wild places. Her poetry collections have won Authors’ Foundation and Saboteur awards, and she is the recipient of the Keats-Shelley prize. Her most recent publications are Wild Persistence (Seren, 2020) and Same But Different, written in collaboration with Helen Mort, (Hazel Press, 2021). She has a PhD from Goldsmiths, tutors for Arvon and the Poetry Society, and chairs the Society of Authors’ poetry and spoken word group.

Naomi’s latest collection, named after a rocky headland to the south of the harbour of Penzance, which takes its name from a gun battery that was placed there in 1740 as a form of protection from French naval attacks, is a book-length meditation on wild swimming. More than that, it is a series of poems about listening, about being aware of our surroundings, listening to our bodies, our brains and our hearts. It is about listening out for danger and knowing when to turn back when we sense that we have reached our limitations.

Some of this is evident from the image on the book cover where we can sense not only the intimacy between the resting woman and the sea but also the art of listening through the seashell that is strategically placed by her ear. It is an adult re-enactment of Wordsworth’s “curious child, who dwelt upon a tract / Of inland ground, applying to his ear / The convolutions of a smooith-lipped shell; / To which in silence hushed, his very soul /Listened intensely….for murmurings from within.” (‘The Sea Shell’). Naomi gives us those “sonorous cadences” which are felt keenly in all weathers and tides. 

The poems are grouped by season, starting with autumn and ending with summer. In these poems she not only explores our relationship with the sea but also tests her own ability to brave the waves and the weather. A quotation from Denise Levertov’s poem ‘Variations on a Theme by Rilke’ unlocks the key to Naomi’s poems. The quotation reads “and what I heard was my whole self / saying and singing what it knew: I can.”  There is also a sense in which the sea shell unlocks her poems if you hold to the belief that a shell’s hard texture makes one’s mind stronger. This is why seashells stand for a resilient and determined mindset. 

Although the collection inhabits a largely positive landscape, there are moments when Naomi examines her own fear and vulnerability, writing in response to an attempted rape and other attacks experienced in the past. In ‘The Sea Speaks’ where she poses the question “could this be my last swim?” and ‘i.m. of Sarah Everard’, she speaks for the vulnerability of all women whether in the sea or on land. 

Climate change is explored in poems such as ‘The Bathing Water Quality Inspector’, a poem full of “slurry run-offs,” “flakes from hardened rubber gloves,” and “particles of arsenic, ammonia, nickel and cadmium”.

If I had to choose one poem to take away with me it would be ‘So Good’. The title itself, expressed in italics, hits us with its emotional impact. Full of that afterglow of satisfaction at the end of a swim, the first line runs on from the title and unfolds in short, magnificent lyrical lines with no time to stop for punctuation as if the swimmer can’t contain herself any longer:

 

     So Good

     she said dripping salt water

     on the cement of land each pore

     a little volcano of happy

     each hair reaching out to sun

     in that loved-up way of arm hair

     while feet stand

     damp under the solemn robe

     cold but mostly oblivious

     now they’re doing their ordinary

     flat thing after the flex & push at fluidity …

 

To Naomi, the sea is a “fickle lover”. “Ours,” she writes, “is not a relationship of equals. / You’re passionate, rough, violent. So much / is an act – you’re always on display - I want you / all to myself.” There are days, however, when the weather is too bad to swim, or when she lists excuses (but usually dismisses them) and goes for her swim anyway. Her love of the sea is bound up with her love of Cornwall. The Cornish language is evident in poems that Naomi writes in Kernewek (Cornish) or references in specific words.

Whether this collection is viewed as a series of closely inter-related poems or one long poem, Naomi’s ability to hold our attention throughout is in itself an impressive achievement.

 

Katrina Naomi, Battery Rocks, Seren, £10.99