No Place To Drown: Battery Rocks By Katrina Naomi

If Katrina Naomi’s rich brocade of ‘sea’ poems is by no means the first collection to embrace a subject of such compelling intractability, then it is certainly the most extraordinary. Wide-angled, committed to the everything, and to the willed nothing of oceanic abandonment, Battery Rocks holds up a mirror to the sea off Penzance as it shapes and is shaped by the perceptions of those who immerse themselves in its dark waters on a daily basis. For Naomi’s obsession, if that’s what it is, is a reflection at least as much of human fear, of how we tend to personify the dynamism and restless energy of the ocean in response to our own unease. Its undercurrents are capricious, regurgitative, overwhelming:

‘It gloated
at its sodden prize

considered carrying me off
Some part of itself

hesitated
threw me high on the rocks’ (‘Valentine’s Day’).

Yet they induce a compulsion whose darker components hint at the needfulness of escape, as they also confer the kind of freedom enjoyed by climbers in extremis. The question of motivation for cold-swimming is resolved in the ‘alarm-clock voices’ of early morning herring gulls, whose careless clarity is a figure for the narrator’s own pristine sense of immediacy as she takes a winter plunge:

I’m awake; I’m awake; I’m awake
Each bird a sequin stunning the air’ (‘Why?’).

It is fitting that Naomi should break her narrative journey into seasonal sections: the device enables an examination of perspective and context in line with the demands of the respective season, as it also encourages an insinuation of poetic forms whose use frames a response to the reckless unknowability of the sea, and to our perception of it. The approach is less counter-intuitive than we might surmise: far from circuitous, Naomi’s style is often direct – a means of engagement tempered by observation, pointed irony and eloquent good sense whose tone interlocks favourably with the form in which it is presented. If ‘The Excuses’ is a self-explanatory ‘decalogue’ of reasons to avoid swimming, then its inventory of clauses – ‘just done my hair / costume’s still wet from earlier/yesterday / there’s a seal’ – is a devil’s advocacy of half-baked rationalisation. More serious philosophical considerations demand at least partial immersion; the ‘sea-intuition’ that spells a retreat is vouchsafed only at the last second, and inferred in the cold pull and push of the moment:

‘But my guts turned to water
as the sea grabbed for my shins
crashed at the base of the cliff’ (‘On Not Getting In’)

Alongside an instinctive foreboding, the tumble ‘of fear and exhilaration’ and the unexpected riptide is the depressingly quantifiable spectre of coastal pollution - the bane of swimmers, of ecologists and of Feargal Sharkey. The shit vented into our seas as the ‘water company holds its nose’ is little less than a national scandal whose consequences have been exacerbated by the dissolution of EU directives. The acerbically sardonic tercets of ‘The Bathing Water Quality Inspector’ give notice of Naomi’s calculated cynicism towards the distributors of faecal matter, plastics and beer cans as she peers into the cess-pool and espies ‘particles of arsenic, ammonia, nickel and cadmium’, the detritus of ‘boat painting season’ and still more toxic ingredients to add to the mix.

Marshalling her own flotilla of the senses in a rather beautiful stilling of time – ‘the glitterball frenzy of sun’; the ‘loud trail of Body / Shop White Musk’;

Where unspoken, Naomi’s commitment to the health and welfare of the seas is unequivocal. Manifest in every poem, in a respectful dialogue with the element under whose dominion her own tenure is leasehold, she displaces salt water and subtracts nothing. But the key word is ‘respect’; respect in the form of applied judgment, a recalibration of the decision-making process to accommodate conditions, inferences. As she does in the figurative toe-dipping of the prose-poem, ‘Before / After’, where ‘We / cross the road past the Battery monument, to the rocks, inspect the waves, the swell. And commit’. The negotiation is significant where nothing can be taken for granted, and ‘The waves know / to the salted minute how long / the dog owners have / to carry their dainty bags of shit before / the sea’s outriders rush / right in’ (‘Today the Weather’s Too Bad to Swim’).

The sea’s foreknowledge – its propensity for spelling sudden danger, or for conjuring strange apparitions in the isolate imaginations of its denizens, like the bull seal in the increasing anxiety of ‘A Certain Presence’ – is a condition of the poet’s instinctive personification of its power, even where boyish machismo (‘LOOK AT US’) will result only in the waves’ indifference (‘Boys and Men’). And best of all, in the hydra-headed drama of sturm und drang, is the moment of grateful calm. Marshalling her own flotilla of the senses in a rather beautiful stilling of time – ‘the glitterball frenzy of sun’; the ‘loud trail of Body / Shop White Musk’; the sibilant hissing of the train, a ‘sleek sea serpent’ surfing the coast – Naomi hangs her poem on the pivot of the sea’s deafening, immeasurably resonant, silence:

‘You hear the tide
-its accent – only in stillness
The rest is noise’ (‘The Sound of Swimming’s Like a Hand Swishing in a Grey Bucket’)

If minimal use of punctuation gives her narrative impetus, maintains a sense of motion like the ceaseless ebb and flow of the water, then her occasional use of the Cornish language (Kernewek) anchors Naomi’s theme to location, and lends it a seductive vigour. The ‘pympbys’ (starfish) of ‘Asterias Rubens’ is the lynchpin of a poem whose delicate beauty resides in the delicacy of Naomi’s own syntax, yet retains a gentle mystique in the circumlocution of pronunciation. Her gorgeous couplets preserve the pympbys in timeless suspension as she relaxes ‘in her own salty galaxy, / each inhale as easy and unhurried as the next, breathing through her trail of feet’. The linguistic power of Kernewek is embodied in sound, and the poet’s translation of her own poem ‘Poem for St Michael’s Mount’, is a joy to declaim even without the requisite understanding, in the repository of language, of ancient culture and religion of the island off Marazion:

‘My a vir orthis – ni oll a vir orthis.
My a omwovynnas a-dro dhe’th poslev, dha yeth,
Dismygi hen Frynkek, breselek, managhek.’

(‘I look at you – we all look at you.
I consider your accent, your language,
imagine ancient French, military, monastic.’)

Later, in the poem ‘Mordrik’, whose onomatopoeic sound almost describes marine detritus at ‘low tide’, we find the text of a poem fractured on the page, as if in hock to the random inventory of visual diversions revealed by the retreating sea – the ‘Barnacles / sunbathe in their millions’, ‘Blennies / sink as best they can’, and ‘Starfish strand / before // dangling / from a gull’s beak’.

The brutal subtext is deftly handled in an elaborate metaphor for the sustained sting of cruelty;

That the process of sea swimming seems to confer an urge for contemplation on its participants is the gift of isolation, perhaps of being cast briefly adrift. Recalled in tranquil hindsight, Naomi’s poems sometimes find darker counterpoints in metaphorical possibility. Her fine double-handed piece ‘The Barbs’ interlaces the prima facie narrative of the first sting of a jellyfish ‘after thousands of swims’, with the cynical ‘infested barbs’ of the male poet(s) who apply misogyny complacently at poetry festivals, in print, and sometimes in person. The brutal subtext is deftly handled in an elaborate metaphor for the sustained sting of cruelty; the road to recovery is assured in the dissolution of pain, and the freedom to sink the arrogance of paternalism amid the waves:

‘I cursed those writers
and their male tentacles
with every stroke of that salted mile
where I was in my element’.

The criticism is earned, and in whichever direction the poet’s telescope is pointed – elsewhere, we find the memory of male abuse (‘i.m. of Sarah Everard’), of unwarranted attention (‘Tattoo’), and of the modern phenomenon of population displacement by second-home buyers (‘Golden Shovel: After a Lillicrap Chilcott Ad’) – we are returned to the sea. Battery Rocks is, above all else, a book of celebration, and in ‘So Good’, a poem of uncommon, image-rich beauty, the full-blooded physical immediacy of a recent swim bursts through the illusion of third-person distancing to capture the clarity and excitement of the moment:

‘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’


Battery Rocks is published by Seren Books (2024)

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