Winter Swimming

by Laura Blomvall

For Jenni

1.
I don’t descend all the way the first time,
only the second. A fractal fugue gluing
cruise ships to South Harbour, thin ice wraps
across the bay, adhering dreams of reaching
Tallinn, Stockholm or Mariehamn. I listen
to the cold’s ghostly half breves: dry flakes
hurling in Eastern winds like gods’ hair,
the origin of Finnish song flurrying
from psalteries, dust of pike’s jawbone.
It’s minus eight degrees, November. Εὖρος,
or here say: östliga vindar / itä-
tuulet / восточный ветры.

2.
First time, I follow my body’s loudness.
Through her skin, it is much safer in – instincts
tell me to keep breathing in, out, in, out.

Second, I listen to the stillness beneath –
stripped to my bikini, I step in water,
melt in the grey paints of the glacial sea.

The worst part is when the waves reach
my hardened nipples, touch the sharper quavers
of my collarbones. I try not to gasp.
I’ve gone down too slow – my legs have gone numb.
I push myself in the sea’s fin-of-eel
ebb, take four, five strokes from the iced steel ladder.

3.
This morning, Jenni warned me, handing over
porridge: Beginners shouldn’t stay in longer
than two minutes. And bring a warmer hat.
She lives in Helsinki with James, her boyfriend
from Hampshire. We met in London; she wrote
on Virginia Woolf, mermaids, sisters, birds.
They left after Brexit, wild swam each morning
during the pandemic. I moved to Bristol,
sounding foreign in my own mother tongue.
(Not from here? the barman quipped last night,
which stung me. I offered to show him my passport.
Jenni sat in the corner, grinning: He’s
interested in you.) Clouds of crowd-breath haze
the triple-glazed bar windows. Labels peel
off chilled bottles, unglued by condensation,
shivering off our beers’ algae-brown glass.

4.
The men coming out of the sea grunt, puff
out their chests. Having conquered their bodies
in swim shorts, they walk off, their thighs spread wide.
The women are silent, gaze at the ground,
like merging with the cold to them is yet
another display of sleight of hand; wiping
of fingerprints after pilgrimage, more
ora et labora. Alone, I post
a photo on Instagram, apply filters
on the scene, closed source shimmer from Metaverse.

My English friends, Sam, Julianne and Ben,
reply with cold face and clapping emojis.
My then lover, Scott, from Forest of Dean,
texts how he waited for more nudity.
Not just the bleakness of the Baltic Sea
with its white horizon, its chiselled stave.

5.
In the sauna, senses return to you,
heat clasps your skin in a deadly hug.
A ciborium, kiulu cradles water
from the shower taps in its pine-carved prayer.
There are all sorts of bodies – we all mutate
into different shapes sitting up or curling
into ourselves, welcoming the hot steam.
Flat chests, breasts stretched from breastfeeding.
Shaved bodies, bodies with natural hair.
Our skins are as vagrant as the sea: smooth,
wind-rippled, warmed by sunlight, frozen, alive.
I don’t want the new nuclear plant… I’m worried
for my father, he forgets things… a release
from Russian gas… my memories trip me…
throw in some more water – and water hisses
on the stones, löyly rising to the ceiling,
holding all women’s words, hot silibants
blowing kisses up our calves. Call and response
of shared keys, a downward economy
of exhalation. I cover my mouth
with my hands, it’s easier to breathe that way.
The air inside my locked fingers feels cool.
My palms loosen, belonging to this heat.

Interview transcript

Mark: Laura, where did this poem come from?

Laura: Hi. Yeah, this poem, I think, came to me first as a line. So I sometimes get this with poems that there’s a line that starts following me around. And in the case of this poem, it was the… I think it was first ‘I don’t go in all the way the first time, / only the second’. And that line started to haunt me. And then I sat down one day and wrote the line down. And this poem, the first draft of this poem, flowed out in one day.

Obviously, there were months of editing afterwards. But yeah, the opening line is where it started. And in some ways, I also think of this poem, which has been published in my first pamphlet, Enter Moon by Broken Sleep Books. It’s one of the only poems in that pamphlet that is, I think, more auto-fictional or have some kind of lived experience behind it. And it was written, I think, in the sense that the British romantic poet, William Wordsworth, describes poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity.

It was written about an experience I had going back to Finland, which is my home country, in December 2021, which was my first time going home after the pandemic, I hadn’t been able to go home because of travel restrictions for a few years. And I went back. And then after visiting my family and friends, I came back to Bristol in the UK, where I live. And about five or six months after being there, yeah, that’s when this line came to my head. And I wrote this five or six months after, or the first draft after having been in Finland.

Mark: So it’s a poem about moving from state to state, I guess…like the elements of the air into the freezing cold water. But also, you talk about going back to your homeland and feeling a bit of a stranger there. And you’ve got friends there who’ve come from England as well.

Laura: Yeah. So I guess it’s very… I’m very strange in the sense that I write poetry in a language that isn’t my mother tongue. So English is my second language. I started to learn it in school when I was 12, although I already knew some English before I started learning it in school. But it’s, yeah, I think a strange relationship to have to the language that you’re writing in, and to the materials of a poem.

And when I go back to Finland, I often feel like I speak in an accent now, if I go back to Finland and speak my mother tongue. So I sound a little bit foreign when I go back. But then also when I’m here, and I speak English, I also have an accent and sound foreign. And sometimes it’s this… I think this poem, I was trying to dig out some of those feelings of dislocation and feeling foreign or out of place, and feeling in an in-between state between different countries and states and how to navigate that.

Mark: Yeah, as I understand, it can be a very awkward state, and sometimes quite a lonely state, but also a creative one.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s very creative in the sense that I can draw on poetic traditions from a number of different countries and languages that I speak. So I grew up with Finnish poetry, and that’s something that I think about a lot. And it’s actually in the poem as well. So when I talk about psalteries and the dust of pike’s jawbone, that’s the kind of reference to the mythological origin of Finnish poetry in the hero Väinämöinen, who’s this mythological figure who invented song and music and poetry by singing with the instrument of kantele, which is a kind of psaltery instrument. And he created the box off that instrument by killing a giant pike, and then he used the jawbone of the pike to create that instrument.

So I imagine the dust of the pike’s jawbone as being the flakes of snow that were falling that day, but then also referencing, like, Finnish poetic traditions that I grew up with. But then at the same time, it’s not in blank verse. So I’m writing in 10- to 11-syllable lines, roughly, which is a very English tradition of poetic writing.

And yeah, in some ways, again, going back to William Wordsworth and his tradition of writing from memory in a blank verse form, which form these long columns on the page. So yeah, this is very creative in the sense that you can draw from a number of different poetic traditions and try and merge them together and create something different.

Mark: And is there an equivalent of that blank verse narrative form in Finnish poetry?

Laura: Yeah, it’s really interesting. So Kalevala, which is the Finnish epic poem, where Väinämöinen, is one of the central characters, is written in trochaic tetrameter. So just for listeners, that’s a line that’s eight syllables long, and it’s in a falling rhythm. So DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da, whereas in English, you would normally have iambic rhythms, which are rising. So da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. So Finnish, because you tend to stress the first syllable, is often in a falling rhythm.

And I’ve noticed that in my writing sometimes… So my poems don’t scan very easily. And I think that’s something that I still carry from my mother tongue, is stressing things in a strange way. And sometimes when English people read my poems, they say they’re quite hard to say or speak out loud, which I find really strange, because I compose a lot of my poems, speaking them out loud, and they feel really good for me to say. But I think it is that kind of rhythm from my mother tongue that sometimes creeps in, that feels very natural to me. And in some ways, I guess I write in an accent.

Mark: That’s a nice way of putting it, writing in an accent. Because you’re right, because, I mean, I guess the most famous example of trochaic meter in English would be Blake, ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright.’ You know, that initial stress, that’s so unusual in English. And this is one reason why I like to record poets on the podcast, because the way you read it, it sounds beautifully fluent, but also it does sound… There’s a precision, I think, that comes across in the way you read it. It would come out differently if I tried to read this, I’m sure.

Laura: Yeah, it is interesting when you hear other people read your poems. I often try and get… I’m part of different writing groups, and we often have this exercise where we share poems and get someone else to read another person’s poem. And it can be quite instructive to see where people stumble, where you wouldn’t stumble yourself, and it makes you look at those lines a second time.

Mark: And going back to the language issue, so you’ve got a few poems, haiku, in the collection, that you write in Finnish and then in English as well. Do you write poetry in Finnish separately to English, or does all your poetry tend to come into the English stream?

Laura: It tends to come into English. I’ve lived in the UK since I was 18, so it’s been my primary written language for a very, very long time. I read Finnish, and I like to translate from Finnish to English. But in terms of the first composition, I compose in English. What I’ve started to do now, I wasn’t doing it when I wrote this poem, but I had some feedback about images that don’t work sometimes in my poems, and I think that’s partly to do with the sense that, like, my visual sense works very differently in Finnish and in English.

So when you’re learning a language as a child, like, one of the first words that I learned in Finnish was the word katso, which means look. And because my parents were pointing out things to me and saying, ‘Look,’ or ‘Katso.’ And I think that’s how we learn a language before we’re conscious of learning a language, or this experience we don’t even remember having now.

So it’s very much the language is attached to the world and to the objects and the environment that we inhabit. Whereas when you learn a language like I did, age 10 to 12 and onwards, you’re kind of learning it from TV, from texts, from school rooms, and it’s mediated in that way. So when I listen to English, I don’t necessarily see with the same immediacy the things that I read or write as I do in Finnish. And what I’ve started doing when I compose poems is putting them in Google Translate. So when I compose a poem in English, I now put it in Google Translate so I can see it in Finnish as well. And often that will highlight, because I will then see the image that I’m describing in a different way. And I use that as a kind of editing practice.

Mark: How interesting. I’ve used it if I’m translating from another language to help me get the gist of it, but I hadn’t thought about using it like that. So okay, throughout the book, you’ve got snatches of other languages coming into poems that are in English, and that happens here. And so you’ve got this wonderful, it seems, facility with different languages. It’s like the doors are open, constantly open for you onto other languages, even though the main through line of the poem is obviously in English.

So would you mind reading the last three lines of the first section? Because we’ve got several languages there, and maybe gloss what’s going on for us here.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely.

It’s minus eight degrees, November. Εὖρος,
or here say: östliga vindar / itä-
tuulet / восточный ветры.

So yeah, Εὖρος (Eurus) in this is the Greek god for the Eastern Wind. So the Greeks in their mythology had… All of the different winds that came from different directions had its own dedicated god, and Eurus was the god dedicated to the Eastern Wind. And then I gloss it in the languages that are spoken in Finland. So first, I say Eastern Winds in Swedish, then Finnish, then in Russian.

So östliga vindar is Eastern Winds in Swedish, itätuulet in Finnish, восточный ветры in Russian. So Russian isn’t an official language in Finland, Swedish and Finnish are. But I’m from the Southwest coast of Finland, which is much closer to Sweden, so when I’m in Helsinki, you see, which is much further East and closer to Russia, and you see some of the Russian colonial marks in the architecture a lot more. So where I was swimming in the south harbour of Helsinki, you can see the statue of the Empress from the Empress Alexandra II’s visit to Helsinki from when Finland was a colony under the Russian Empire. So you can kind of… Like, the signs of Russian colonialism are very present in Helsinki, and it feels further East to me coming from the West Coast.

Mark: So you grew up in a multilingual culture.

Laura: Yeah. So I grew up in a city called Turku, which is on the Southwest coast, and that’s bilingual. So it’s half Swedish-speaking, half Finnish-speaking. I moved to Brussels when I was young. And Brussels is also bilingual. It’s half French, half Flemish-speaking. And I went to an international school. I had a Finnish education in a school where lots of different European languages were being spoken. So it feels very comfortable to me to be surrounded and swap from one language to another.

Mark: Okay. And I love the fact that you just give us these languages, even with different scripts, untranslated in the poem. They’re there for us to encounter and make what we will of them. So talking of encounters, what about the opening lines, ‘I don’t descend all the way the first time, / only the second?’ That line and a half followed you around.

What do you think your Muse was interested in, that it kept tapping you on the shoulder and saying, ‘Hey, there’s a poem here?’

Laura: Yeah, I wonder where poems come from sometimes. Yeah, I think I’m often interested in verticality, like, the experience of going down and coming back up and what that can represent emotionally. And obviously, there’s a very physical sense of going down and then coming back up and going from cold to hot and those transitions of different states. But I don’t know how conscious I was when I was first writing that. It almost just came out as it was. And the first draft of it looks structurally very similar to what it is now.

I did a lot of editing on it in terms of changing around word choices and punctuation and line ends, expanding imagery, expanding some sections in the middle. But the first draft just came out in this moment of recollection. And I think often also sound is very important to me. So often I start hearing, like, a sound in my head and almost, like, the sound of the word comes to me before the word comes. I know, like, the sound of a word that I want to come next because there’s a kind of musical line that I’m searching after. And sometimes the poem in sections also came through in that way, following this, like, line of sound.

Mark: And you use the word verticality. This might be a bit crude, but I’m thinking of a diagram. You’ve got a vertical axis, which is the humans going down into the water, down into the dark, into this ice-cold, bone-chilling water. So on the one hand, it’s this very uncompromising verticality, as you say, from the human safe world down to this dark, cold element. But on the other hand, you could draw a horizontal axis and say it’s a very social poem because it’s all about friendship and people encouraging you, Yenny, giving you advice, going for a drink afterwards, going in the sauna, very social activity there.

Could you say something about that relationship between the human world and the elemental world?

Laura: Yeah, I think that’s a very, like, key aspect of the poem as well. Or when you’re kind of, I guess, having an immigrant experience and moving between your home country and the country of your residence, is being in the middle of different friendship groups of people who live in Finland and have lived there for a long time and the different experience they have being there. And then also, I think there’s the text messages that come in from your friends who are back in the UK, and they have a very different response to the act of swimming.

So, for example, like swimming, my friend Jenni, who does swimming every day, for her, it’s very easy. She doesn’t need to fight her will in order to go down into the water. It’s so natural to her. But then your UK friends, like, they’re on a different scale where they think what you’re doing is so incredibly hardcore. And you’re like, as a person, I’m somewhere in the middle where I think it’s hardcore, but also very natural. And it’s being in between those different perspectives of different people.

And there’s the Finnish barman as well, who comes in the poem and doesn’t think the speaker is from Finland. And this upset about having a Finnish passport and being born there and then not being recognised as being part of that country anymore. Yeah, so there’s a real joy in, like, all of those friendships.

And then also, like, navigating that people have different cultural histories and memories and life experiences, yeah, and finding peace in it. And then the last section in the sauna, the sauna section in the poem as well, I see kind of, I guess, this harmony coming in with the voices of the different women in the sauna who are having their conversations, and you’re all sharing in the same steam. And suddenly there’s this moment of harmony and belonging and feeling like everyone is on the same level with each other, or like where you come from or where you live doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore.

Mark: It also strikes me that that in-between state is very often associated with the poet. So Baudelaire had his famous image of the poet as the albatross, who’s completely ungainly on land, but it’s only when it takes off into the air. And the Irish poet Louis MacNeice, he lived so long in England that people in Ireland started to give him a backhanded compliment. They said he was ‘a tourist in his own country’. And I remember there was a critic, I can’t remember who it was, said, ‘Well, okay, but surely that’s always true of the artist.’ You’ve got that doubleness. You’re living the life, but you’re observing it, and you’re commenting on it, and you’re saying something about it.

Laura: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. There’s this quote from Rachel Cusk novel, Outline, that I really like. There’s a creative writing instructor who’s in Greece and is teaching creative writing to Greek students in English. And she says, ‘It almost makes you feel guilty the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.’

And I’m really interested in that, like, what those essential items… whether it’s a rhythm of the way that I speak that I bring with me, but also, like, in the reverse of that. So ironically, in that scene, they’re in an apartment in Greece that doesn’t belong to them, that belongs to a Greek woman. And they are, like, trying to come into relation to these possessions in that flat that aren’t theirs, and dream and imagine the histories of those objects and what they say about that person.

And I think when I come into English, yeah, there is this, like, state of dreaming in a way that enters in, like, dreaming what my relation to those words on the page are. That is loose from context, I guess, in the sense that I might know the historical and cultural context of a lot of the words. I studied English literature, so I have that context on an intellectual level, but as a child, I didn’t grow up with that language. So the childhood that you spend having a relationship and a context to a language, is absent, or ephemeral or peripheral in a different way. And you spend your way… You kind of… I feel like I’m dreaming my way into that language. And as a poet, yeah, that can be a really strange, but also generative and inspiring space to inhabit.

Mark: Thank you, Laura. I think those two phrases, ‘a state of dreaming’ ‘a generous and inspiring place to inhabit’ – that’s very much the feeling I get from reading the poems in Enter Moon, and this one in particular. So maybe this would be a good time to hear the poem again.

Laura: Yeah. Thank you so much, Mark.

Winter Swimming

by Laura Blomvall

For Jenni

1.
I don’t descend all the way the first time,
only the second. A fractal fugue gluing
cruise ships to South Harbour, thin ice wraps
across the bay, adhering dreams of reaching
Tallinn, Stockholm or Mariehamn. I listen
to the cold’s ghostly half breves: dry flakes
hurling in Eastern winds like gods’ hair,
the origin of Finnish song flurrying
from psalteries, dust of pike’s jawbone.
It’s minus eight degrees, November. Εὖρος,
or here say: östliga vindar / itä-
tuulet / восточный ветры.

2.
First time, I follow my body’s loudness.
Through her skin, it is much safer in – instincts
tell me to keep breathing in, out, in, out.

Second, I listen to the stillness beneath –
stripped to my bikini, I step in water,
melt in the grey paints of the glacial sea.

The worst part is when the waves reach
my hardened nipples, touch the sharper quavers
of my collarbones. I try not to gasp.
I’ve gone down too slow – my legs have gone numb.
I push myself in the sea’s fin-of-eel
ebb, take four, five strokes from the iced steel ladder.

3.
This morning, Jenni warned me, handing over
porridge: Beginners shouldn’t stay in longer
than two minutes. And bring a warmer hat.
She lives in Helsinki with James, her boyfriend
from Hampshire. We met in London; she wrote
on Virginia Woolf, mermaids, sisters, birds.
They left after Brexit, wild swam each morning
during the pandemic. I moved to Bristol,
sounding foreign in my own mother tongue.
(Not from here? the barman quipped last night,
which stung me. I offered to show him my passport.
Jenni sat in the corner, grinning: He’s
interested in you.) Clouds of crowd-breath haze
the triple-glazed bar windows. Labels peel
off chilled bottles, unglued by condensation,
shivering off our beers’ algae-brown glass.

4.
The men coming out of the sea grunt, puff
out their chests. Having conquered their bodies
in swim shorts, they walk off, their thighs spread wide.
The women are silent, gaze at the ground,
like merging with the cold to them is yet
another display of sleight of hand; wiping
of fingerprints after pilgrimage, more
ora et labora. Alone, I post
a photo on Instagram, apply filters
on the scene, closed source shimmer from Metaverse.

My English friends, Sam, Julianne and Ben,
reply with cold face and clapping emojis.
My then lover, Scott, from Forest of Dean,
texts how he waited for more nudity.
Not just the bleakness of the Baltic Sea
with its white horizon, its chiselled stave.

5.
In the sauna, senses return to you,
heat clasps your skin in a deadly hug.
A ciborium, kiulu cradles water
from the shower taps in its pine-carved prayer.
There are all sorts of bodies – we all mutate
into different shapes sitting up or curling
into ourselves, welcoming the hot steam.
Flat chests, breasts stretched from breastfeeding.
Shaved bodies, bodies with natural hair.
Our skins are as vagrant as the sea: smooth,
wind-rippled, warmed by sunlight, frozen, alive.
I don’t want the new nuclear plant… I’m worried
for my father, he forgets things… a release
from Russian gas… my memories trip me…
throw in some more water – and water hisses
on the stones, löyly rising to the ceiling,
holding all women’s words, hot silibants
blowing kisses up our calves. Call and response
of shared keys, a downward economy
of exhalation. I cover my mouth
with my hands, it’s easier to breathe that way.
The air inside my locked fingers feels cool.
My palms loosen, belonging to this heat.

Enter Moon

‘Winter Swimming’ by Laura Blomvall is from Enter Moon published by Broken Sleep Books.

Available from:

Enter Moon is available from:

The publisher: Broken Sleep Books

Amazon: UK | US

Laura Blomvall

Laura Blomvall is a Finnish poet living in Bristol. Her poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Propel Magazine and elsewhere and her academic research has been published by Cambridge University Press, Edinburgh University Press and others. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Enter Moon, was published by Broken Sleep Books in September 2025.