Rhizodont
Published on 21. June 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
160 pages
978-1-78037-713-1 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of The Laurel Prize 2025
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 won The Laurel Prize 2025 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024.
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 won The Laurel Prize 2025 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024.
Reviews / Votes
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) Katrina Porteous has always kept faith with the North East, where times of transition are intensly played out in the post-industrial landscapes. She refuses to ignore local language either, offering work adept in Northumbrian dialect, modern English, and the argot of science. Rhizodont considers deep time, extractive industry, alienation, and the efforts of communities to survive with integrity, and, in a crucial act of imagination, she speaks as other non-human entities, an ice-core, a redshank. We were impressed by the way her attention to the small and local belied the sweep and depth of her project. Rhizodont displays modern lyricism by a senior poet, loving, knowing, and authoritative. -- Kathleen Jamie * Chair of The Laurel Prize 2025 Judges * Katrina Porteous's Rhizodont is a polyphonic hymn to England's North-East coast, burrowing in 'ware stink / and salty tangle' as it ranges nimbly across historical timescales and between Northumbrian dialect and scientific discourse. Contemporary dog walkers inhabit the same space as sooty collieries and Scotch gutters; in turn, the recent industrial past fades into the sound of the waves, a blackbird with soil on his whiskers, and the longer and stranger movements of geological time, when Northumberland was a tropical swamp and huge freshwater fish began hauling themselves onto land. Intimate and elegiac as a record of the recent past, Rhizodont is also a dazzling meditation on the relationship between man, nature, and machine. -- Mimi Khalvati, Anthony Joseph and Hannah Sullivan * T.S. Eliot Prize 2024 Judges *More details
Edition
Paperback original
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight
376 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-713-1 (9781780377131)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
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.
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.
Content
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 Sella?eld '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
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 Sella?eld '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