Katrina Naomi and Penelope Shuttle: Poetry Reading

4.30-6.30pm 12 October  
The Writers' Block, The Ladder, 2-4 Clinton Road, Redruth, TR15 2QE
Tickets: £7 













Katrina Naomi:

Katrina is an award-winning poet, performer, mentor and judge. Her new poetry collection, Battery Rocks, (Seren, 2024) is the winner of the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors. Katrina’s previous collections have won an Authors’ Foundation Award and Saboteur Award, and she is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize. Katrina’s poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Poetry Please, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths. Katrina lives in Cornwall  www.katrinanaomi.co.uk

Battery Rocks

“Each poem rolls in and out like the sea and refreshes like a wild swim.” – Roger Robinson

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. 

Katrina will be leading a workshop beforehand, please book tickets for the workshop here.
 

Penelope Shuttle:

Penelope Shuttle lives in Cornwall, and is a widely-published and broadcast author.  Kate Kellaway describes her thirteenth collection Lyonesse as ‘a singular, arresting and moving book in which her talent, far from seeming familiar or faded, is underpinned by the accumulated wisdom of decades. (The Observer). Shuttle was a judge for the Women Poets’ Prize in 2022, and for the Patricia Eschen Poetry Competition, also in 2022.  She was a judge for the 2023 Ledbury Second Collection Prize.  She has also been a judge for the National Poetry Competition, for the Arvon Competition, etc. Her work has been widely broadcast, and she is a contributor to The Verb. Her radio poem about Falmouth was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2021, as Conversations on a Bench, and included vox pop contributions from a variety of Falmouth residents. Her work can be heard at The Poetry Archive. Gerard Woodward says that Shuttle is a poet of immense reach, both in the range of her subject-matter and the breadth of her language.  She is both an acute observer and an inventive fiction-maker.

Penelope is the President of the Falmouth Poetry Group, and is a founder member from the groups inception in 1972.

The Odd Couple?

Her two most recent pamphlets have both, in different ways, taken a wry look at representatives of the patriarchy, the first being bible-Noah, and the second, more elusively, Saint Feock of Cornwall.
Noah began in a circuitous way.  Peter Redgrove, her late husband, had studied Old and Middle English texts, and there were a number of these volumes and dictionaries on our shelves.  One day she started to draw their strange and mysterious vocabulary into poems that focussed on Noah, most especially via a number of medieval guild plays about Noah and the Flood.  And current environment issues, species loss in particular, move through many of the poems. 

And Saint Feock?  In 2022 she was invited, with other Cornwall-based poets and photographers, to write sestudes about a Cornish location, which appeared as an exhibition and as a book, 26 Places in Cornwall/26 Tyller yn Kernow. She was given Saint Feock.  Well.  Who is Saint Feock?  Or is it Faycock, Fioc, Maeoc or Veage?  The Cornish Saint Feock is a half-imaginary, half-historic personage. Our saint is sometimes female, sometimes male. An early Christian missionary, or an elemental spirit whose domain is a riverside creek. This liminal shape-shifting figure called to me until I found myself writing an alphabet to celebrate his/her qualities. The brief form of the sestude gave shape and purpose to my encounters with Feock of Kernow, tempting me to conjure up this elusive alluring saint.