Rhizodont

by Katrina Porteous

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780377131
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

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 BBC Radio 3 and 4.

Table of Contents

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  Sellafield ‘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

Editorial Reviews

'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.' –  T.S. Eliot Prize 2024 Judges

‘The book is in some ways a snapshot of this moment in time … a snapshot that can be looked back at and say here are our challenges rights now, which is a wonderful thing I think for poetry and for science.’ – Jumoké Fashola, on Rhizodont

'Porteous’s practice feels collaborative and generous, absorbing and interacting with other voices, including those working in other fields: she is a great gatherer and synthesizer of scientific, historical and biographical information. [...] It is easy to be swept along by Rhizodont’s long, thoughtful sequences, which both explore the past and hint at the future.' – Lenni Sanders, The Times Literary Supplement

'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)

‘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

‘In this collection, images of water and the coastline render tangible the epic making and re-making of the planet, the temporary nature of its creatures and geological features. […] In surreal and urgent ways, Rhizodont imagines the palimpsest of geological history that each landscape holds, unearthing its layers, imparting a sense of wonder at nature’s capacity for reinvention.’ – Tusshara Nalakumar Srilatha, TS Eliot Prize Young Critic

From the Publisher