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Rhizodont
Brief Description
Winner of The Laurel Prize 2025 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...
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See moreWinner of the Laurel Prize 2025. Against a backdrop of vast geological time and recent fossil-fuel burning history, Porteous’s poems explore issues of social and environmental change as well as technological revolution – autonomous systems, AI, and remote-sensing techniques used to measure Earth’s changing climate in the Antarctic.
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Description
Winner of The Laurel Prize 2025
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.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781780377131
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 21 June 2024
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Edition: Paperback original
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 156.0mm
Height: 234.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 160
Collections
About the Author
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.
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