330 million years ago what is now the rocky shore close to Katrina Porteous's Northumberland home 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. Rhizodont is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024.

About the Author
Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen, grew up in Co. Durham, and has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987. She read History at Cambridge and afterwards studied in the USA on a Harkness Fellowship. Many of the poems in her first collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe Books, 1996), focus on the Northumbrian fishing community, about which Katrina has also written in prose in The Bonny Fisher Lad (The People's History, 2003). Katrina also writes in Northumbrian dialect, and has recorded her long poem, The Wund an' the Wetter, on CD with piper Chris Ormston (Iron Press, 1999). Her second full-length collection from Bloodaxe, Two Countries (2014), was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Literature in 2015. Katrina has been involved in many collaborations with other artists, including public art for Seaham, Co. Durham, with sculptor Michael Johnson, and two books with maritime artist James Dodds, Longshore Drift (Jardine Press, 2005) and The Blue Lonnen (Jardine Press, 2007). She often performs with musicians, including Chris Ormston, Alistair Anderson and Alexis Bennett. She is particularly known for her radio-poetry, much of it produced by Julian May. One of these poems, Horse, with electronic music by Peter Zinovieff, first performed at Sage Gateshead for the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival 2011, is published as an artists' book and CD, with prints by Olivia Lomenech Gill (Windmillsteads Books, 2014). Katrina's third full-length collection, Edge (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), draws on three collaborations commissioned for performance in Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle, between 2013 and 2016, with multi-channel electronic music by Peter Zinovieff: Field, Sun and Edge. Sun was part of NUSTEM's Imagining the Sun project for schools and the wider public (Northumbria University, 2016). Edge, a poem in four moons incorporating sounds collected from space missions, was broadcast as a Poetry Please Special on BBC Radio 4 in 2013. Her fourth poetry book from Bloodaxe, Rhizodont, will be published in June 2024.

Reviews
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)



Book Information
ISBN 9781780377131
Author Katrina Porteous
Format Paperback
Page Count 160
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd