Rhizodont
Katrina Porteous
(Author)
Description
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.
Product Details
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books |
| Publish Date | September 03, 2024 |
| Pages | 160 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781780377131 |
| Dimensions | 9.1 X 6.1 X 0.6 inches | 0.7 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
'Rhizodont, Porteous's fourth collection, is a hymn to the Earth, a love letter to the North East. The dialect of Northumberland washes it in a tide of language and, across these shifting sands of words, we step out of time and survey the planet from a geological perspective. The rhizodont of the title, a fossil fish which became extinct 310 million years ago, recalibrates our sense of time and reminds us that the Earth's cycles of erosion, extinction and creation transcend us. The result is a thrilling meeting of ideas and language as Porteous blurs the boundary between man and machine, between planet and technology.' - John Field, TS Eliot Prize reviewer
'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)
'Rhizodont is about survival and extinction within cultures, communities and languages, as well as in the natural world.' - Rowan Bell, The Friday Poem
'Rhizodont does for the mining and fishing communities of post-Thatcher Northumberland what Heaney did for mid century Mid-Ulster, archiving the vast richness of its language, culture and work-lives. Porteous' painterly eye for detail gives depth and resonance to the histories and dramas of her human and non-human subjects alike.' - Dave Coates, Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2024 (Summer Reading)
'Rhizodont is the new book from Katrina Porteous. This detailed and wide-ranging collection, while rooted in the North East, explores global landscapes and themes of ecology and community.' - Will Mackie, New & Recent Poetry from the North: Summer 2024
'What are we doing to the planet? What is technology doing to us? These are the common themes, according to the poet herself, within the new collection of poetry by Katrina Porteous, who might well be described as the laureate of the Northumberland coast.' - Greg Freeman, Write Out Loud
'...this is just stunning. Ideas cover time, deep time - and her deep connections to the place - her place in Northumberland on the north east coast of England. You do not need to know her home to become utterly absorbed in the stories she tells.' - Hugh Warwick (Top 3 Books), Shepherd Books
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