London Grip Poetry Review – Katrina Naomi

 

Poetry review – BATTERY ROCKS: Louise Warren finds Katrina Naomi’s new collection to be an eloquent testimony to the joys of swimming.

 

Battery Rocks 
Katrina Naomi
Seren
ISBN: 9781781727546
£10.99

I have swum at Battery Rocks in Cornwall. Tucked behind the 1930s Jubilee Pool Lido, just off the seafront in Penzance, it is a hidden jewel of rocks and sea where swimmers regularly meet all through the year and climb down the rough steps into the water. As an all-year round swimmer myself, I completely connect with these poems.

                    I need your chill; can’t help myself.
You swoosh round my brain, frolicking
with neurones, make my skin fit me, tighter,
tighter, after I’ve plunged right in.

Naomi has gathered the whole sea community together in this luminous book – other swimmers, wildlife, a bathing water quality inspector. She even writes from the sea’s perspective at one point. The poems flow easily from one to the other, helped by almost every final line lacking a full stop. The book is divided into sections: Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer.

Sometimes, Naomi refers to herself in the first person:

                                   I pound the water
as if attached to a length of elastic
a dark blue mitten

But sometimes she distances herself:

You look back
over your bare shoulder

as on a moorland, when you turn

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. In the poem ‘I’m of Sarah Everard’, she writes,

Memories surface
          of my own attack
36 years ago
He still swims alongside

But there is also courage and fortitude in her images. She tells us, “I’ve learnt to swim in rough seas”. Yet the male predator still pervades, as in ‘Tatoo’ where a fellow male swimmer watches her dress. We sense how deeply uncomfortable she feels, how suddenly vulnerable:

I force jogging bottoms up over wet thighs, cram a T-shirt down; everything sticks
sprint barefoot for the road, to cars, people, a yellow-white Council truck

Yet her daily swims continue to heal, to energise and to inspire.

Oh
A bright inbreath as a swimmer stops
disturbing the glitterball frenzy of sun on sea

A tanker twists on its anchor
In the silent disco, showing its port
Its starboard

In the longest poem, ‘On distance’, Naomi conjures up a curated sequence of thoughts, images and memories that jostle, dip, rise up and break around her as she swims, a sequence of currents, past and present that carry her along. These disjointed images work best if you imagine it is written with the movement of the sea in mind.

I swim out to the buoy the shipping lane
my arms glossy as the flank of a horse
who’s happy to stand in the shade   rippling the muscles
of her back.   avoiding the everyday irritations
saving her energy
for what’s important to a horse
keeping herself in the shade of an oak

Back and forth she goes, leaving breaks in the middle of lines like gulps of air, the thoughts bumping around her like the sea itself. Japan, her parents, her childhood, the elastic of a Panama hat, the image of a horse, a tree, a story, all part of one free-flowing narrative.

Naomi lives in Cornwall and draws on the landscape, folklore and Cornish (Kernewek) language to emphasise the magic of place in the poems. I particularly liked the words Zawn (fissure in a cliff) and An Mor (the sea). The sea is ally, lover, life, an extension of herself, yet also a wild element to be respected.

She throws herself at me, as I cling
to the lull of mossed rocks, washes me

away into her shouty body, jumps up like a geyser:
jagged hills rush my head, she plays, allows a little time for me

to find my breath, snort a mouthful, before her grey mountain looms
I yell into the bay for the hell of it, this tumble
of fear and exhilaration:

Throughout this collection I really had the sense of a poet who has worked through a theme, imaginatively and personally. There is much to admire in the scope and breadth of her subject matter; yet I prefer Naomi when her poet’s lens zooms into small details, as when she describes jelly fish: “Your gassy bag of sail crimped like a pasty” or “Your lacy, length bike chains / your party poppers of venom”. I love too the playful, inventive language she uses about the sea:

I loll for a moment like a woman in a bath
                                    sniffing at vodka

Or

I could swim on
                       but that’s the sea talking

                                                pulling me out
                                             
                                                                           out with the tide

                                                                                       of its woozy lotus voice.


Or this description of a swimming costume “The cossie sits at my ankles like a dejected dog”

The collection ends with an evocative description of a kelp forest, taking us down into its magical depths: “Sliding her mind through slender lengths of weed fabric-like plastic-like part translucent part shine like nothing else but kelp.”

This is a collection to return to, to dive into and to relish. It may even tempt you off land into the wintery waves. Once tried you may become a convert like me!

Yes, this is an obsession, a 
Glorious reacquaintance- kales- precarious
at best.  I plunge from the rough-cut stairway