Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024
Against a backdrop of vast geological time and recent fossil-fuel burning history, the poems of Katrina Porteous's latest collection address current issues of social and environmental change.
330 million years ago what is now the rocky shore close to Katrina Porteous's Northumberland home in the north of England was a tropical swamp inhabited by three-metre long predatory fish with huge tusk-like teeth. They belonged to a family of lobe-finned fishes which evolved to move on land as well as swim, and which are the ancestors of all four-limbed vertebrates, including humans. The fossil fish found in Northumberland is called the 'rhizodont'.
Porteous's new collection begins with a lovingly-observed contemporary journey through these ancient landscapes, from the former coal-mining communities of the Durham coast, where the coal-bearing Carboniferous strata are overlain with younger rocks, to the Northumberland shores where the rhizodont's remains were found. Against a backdrop of vast geological time and recent fossil-fuel burning history, these poems address current issues of social and environmental change. They are followed by two sequences about aspects of the latest technological revolution
autonomous systems and AI, and the remote-sensing techniques used to explore the most inaccessible reaches of our planet, Antarctica, to measure Earth's changing climate.
The poems unfold from England's North-East coast into global questions of evolution, survival and extinction
in communities and languages, and throughout the natural world, where hope resides in Life's astonishing powers of reinvention.
Rhizodont is Katrina Porteous's fourth poetry collection from Bloodaxe, and extends territory explored in her three previous books. It combines scientific themes from Edge (2019) with the ecological localism of Two Countries (2014) and The Lost Music (1996), both of which were concerned with the landscapes and communities of North-East England.
By:
Katrina Porteous
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: Paperback original
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781780377131
ISBN 10: 1780377134
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 21 June 2024
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
9 Introduction 13 How the Fishes Listen 14 Ingredients BOOK I: CARBONIFEROUS I Horden – Seaham 17 Tinkers’ Fires 18 Kittycouldhavebeen 20 Tiny Lights 21 Wildlife 23 Coastal Erosion 24 A Short Walk from the Sea’s Edge 26 Painted Ladies 27 Speckled Wood 28 Hermeneutics II North Shields 29 Wooden Doll 30 Saa’t 32 Low Light 34 Shields Gut III Low Hauxley – Warkworth 35 Passage Migrants 37 Northern Wheatear 38 Tudelum 39 Sand Martins 40 Bloody Cranesbill 41 Cormorant 42 Cubby 43 Birds 45 Fog 46 Wishbone 47 Linnets 48 The Braid 49 Grey Heron 50 The Auld Watter 51 Full Tide on the Coquet IV Beadnell – Bamburgh 52 Can 53 Off Beadnell Point 54 Sandylowper 55 A Lang Way Hyem 67 Goldcrests 68 Arguments 69 The Long Line 73 A Hut a Byens 75 The Tide Clock V Holy Island – Cocklawburn 77 The Fulmar 78 The Old Lifeboat House 79 Many Hands 80 Gleaners 81 Philadelphia 82 Gateway 83 Red List Species 84 Absences 85 Woven 86 Beblowe 87 Anonymous 88 Dig 89 Arctic Terns 91 Begin Again 92 Cocklawburn 93 #rhizodont BOOK II: INVISIBLE EVERWHERE 96 Organic 97 Sea Chant 1 97 Sea Chant 2 98 The Website at the End of the World 99 INGENIOUS 99 1 Autonomous 99 I 100 II Landscape for an Autonomous Vehicle 100 III Sellafield ‘Legacy’ Storage Ponds 101 IV CARMA 102 V MIRRAX 103 2 Space 103 I ADR 103 II 104 III Sample Analysis on Mars 105 IV Ingenuity Has Photographed Perseverance 106 3 Cybernetics 106 I 106 II 106 III 107 IV Moon 108 V Human 109 VI Autonomous 109 VII 110 VIII I Want to Step Inside You, Computer 111 IX 112 Wave 113 UNDER THE ICE 113 1 Unseen 114 2 Float 114 3 Thwaites 115 4 Antarctica Without Its Ice 116 5 Five Eyes 117 6 Cosmogenic Nuclide 118 7 Basal Shear 119 8 Invisible Mending 120 9 Ice Core 120 10 Waves 121 11 Numerical Ice Sheet Modelling 122 12 Melt 123 13 Remote Sensing 127 Notes 154 Acknowledgements 158 Biographical note
Katrina Porteous has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987. Many of the poems in her first collection, The Lost Music (1996), explore the Northumbrian fishing community. Her second full-length collection from Bloodaxe, Two Countries (2014), was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature in 2015. Her third full-length collection, Edge (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), draws on collaborations commissioned for performance in Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle, between 2013 and 2016, with multi-channel electronic music by Peter Zinovieff. Her fourth is Rhizondont (2024). She has worked on many collaborations with other artists, often performs with musicians, and is particularly known for her radio-poetry broadcast on BBCRadio 3 and 4.
Reviews for Rhizodont
Functioning like a cosmic map from the level of sub-atomic particles to vast celestial bodies, Edge succeeds in wedding the arts with science to make a mesmerising and transporting collection. Porteous makes precise and artful use of scientific terminology to complement her sparse and tightly constructed verse. The full effect is to bring the reader to a state of communion; to instil a sense of beauty and belonging to the world of particles, fields, waves, and the behaviour of massive gravitational bodies. -- Jade Cuttle * PBS Bulletin * Regardless of their performance roots, I found the poems in Edge to be strong, evocative pieces exploring the cosmos and the creation of matter and life vibrantly and distinctively through image, metaphor and all the tools available to a skilled poet. The fact that, stylistically, they often appear lean and pared down makes their lyrical imagining of highly complex scientific theories all the more impressive. -- J.S. Watts * The High Window * Katrina Porteous is that rare, robust perennial bloom, a poet whose lyricism is founded upon clarity of expression and precise attention to the spoken word, whose intellectual sophistication is clothed in simplicity and whose themes are of universal significance, yet rooted in a lifelong commitment to local community and the Northumbrian landscape. -- Mark Cocker (author, naturalist, environmental activist)