Wild Persistence

By Katrina Naomi

Katrina Naomi’s Wild Persistence is a confident and persuasive collection of poems. The first poem ‘Anti-Ambient’ warns us to be on guard for the off-guard, to suspend our expectations of pure realism and to stay awake for what comes next. Initially, a move from London to Cornwall sparks poems that query and celebrate the natural world. London is mourned and also derided: “you’d taken on airs/ become grandiose with the possibilities of capital.” Yet the poem also admits that the choice of a move was made by serendipitous chance: “somewhere I’d visited long ago on a rainy night, playing pool/ in a pub near a seaside bus station.”
Though never didactic, the poetic voice convinces us of the need to live well, to take time to celebrate a birthday, make love, consider an artwork, muse over the biography of someone admirable. This also means that we need to come face to face with some of the darker aspects of our experience, in Naomi’s case the loss of a father through divorce when she was seven, and the illness experienced by her sister and partner. Another section of poems that deals with the aftermath of an attempted rape. Naomi’s poetic voice is full of invigoratingly fresh outrage and is unforgiving at a distance of years to the casual passers-by who did nothing to help. She also casts a cold eye on the assailant, whom she ultimately pities, imagining him now ‘fat and in his fifties’ and destroyed by his predilection for violence.
‘...this is a liberating reminder that “there are different ways to live”...nothing can suppress the wild and quirky energy at play... Wild Persistence is the joyous affirmation we need.’ – PBS
“A collection of humour and revelry, lit by the repeated flare of violence and warmed by the unapologetic need to live the life of one’s choosing.” – New Welsh Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seren
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781781725825

Katrina Naomi

Katrina Naomi was awarded an Authors’ Foundation grant by the Society of Authors in 2018 for work on her third poetry collection, which is due from Seren in 2020. In 2018, she received a BBC commission for National Poetry Day, her poem ‘Countrywoman’ was broadcast on radio and made into a film-poem and broadcast on television. Katrina has just completed a residency at the Leach Pottery in St Ives, Cornwall. She has recently returned from a writing trip to Japan, following a grant from the Arts Council International Artist’s Development Fund. Katrina’s poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (Front Row and Poetry Please) and appeared in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her latest collection, The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, Seren (2016), was praised by Vicki Feaver for its ‘cool voice and fierce eye’ and chosen by Foyles Bookshop as one of its #FoylesFive for poetry. In 2017, her poem ‘The Bicycle’ was highly commended in The Forward Prize for Poetry and she was nominated for the 2017 Best of the Net Award.