Battery
Rocks

  • as featured on BBC Radio 4‘s Open Country
  • ‘bright, brilliant imagery, often gloriously camp and kitsch’ – Ellora Sutton, Mslexia
     
  • uncommon, image-rich beauty‘ – Steve Witacker, Yorkshire Times

  • Battery Rocks is Daljit Nagra‘s ‘book of the month’ on BBC Radio 4 Extra ‘Poetry Extra’

94 pages
Published: July 8, 2024
Publisher: Seren
ISBN:
978 1 781727 54 6 

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.

sample poem

in the kelp forest

the first time she finds herself      among brown strands
between fear and wonder      floating      in this other world      of
upside down      a place a person could wed herself to      so much
dank silence      beyond her breath      the gentle murmur of
limbs      in suspension      their arc and splay      there’s no
peace like this in the dry country      she’s like a body in a jar at
the lab      but keeps her Dutch colours      sliding her mind
through slender lengths of weed      fabric-like      plastic-like
part translucent      part shine      like nothing else but kelp      her
restless hair goes on its own pulsing journey      she forgets
for blissed moments      she can’t breathe      here this isn’t air
waves nudge overhead      it’s like any place almost visited
say a city      say Seville      and she talks half-seriously      half
what-if      of how she might live here      the kelp wafts in
welcome      displays its tentacles      as she refuses neoprene
longs for kelp’s beckon      and touch      longs to pass as a local
a strange fish for sure      but one who could belong

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