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.