An epic of the wild Northumbrian coast, invoking history, myth and memory. First broadcast on BBC Radio 4. No road leads to Dunstanburgh Castle; but over the course of a year Katrina Porteous, who lives within sight of this lonely Northumbrian ruin, visited it in all weathers, minutely observing its seasonal changes. The result is this poem, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in February 2004. Dunstanburgh draws on the local legend of a child trapped in the rock and of the Seeker who must search for her; on the memory of raids by Scots reivers; and on the political ideal of 'good lordship' which the castle was built to embody. Using chants, dialect and the wild music of the castle itself - kittiwakes, skylarks, swallows, waves, wind and rain - the poem evokes the secret history, human and natural, of this mysterious, windswept place.

Dunstanburgh

Literature & Fiction

Porteous, Katrina

Poetry

Smokestack Books

The poems and photographs in The Blue Lonnen are selected from an exhibition commissioned by Alnwick Playhouse Trust in 2006. The Blue Lonnen is an elegy in words and pictures for the traditional wooden boat of the English North East coast, the coble

The Blue Lonnen

Jardine Press Ltd

Limekilns and Lobsterpots: A Walk Around Old Beadnell

Windmillstead Books / Jardine Press Ltd

Scientists and engineers are the great explorers of our age. Inspired by the work of leading research scientists, by CERN's Large Hadron Collider, space telescopes which allow us to see our Sun in wavelengths far beyond human vision, and by the Cassini mission's astonishing photos of Saturn's moons, poet Katrina Porteous translates to the non-scientist contemporary questions about the nature of physical reality and our understanding of it. Edge contains three poem sequences, Field, Sun and the title sequence, which extend Porteous' previous work on nature, place and time beyond the human scale. They take the reader from the micro quantum worlds underlying the whole universe, to the macro workings of our local star, the potential for primitive life elsewhere in the solar system on moons such as Enceladus, and finally to the development of complex consciousness on our own planet. As scientific inquiry reveals the beauty and poetry of the universe, Edge celebrates the almost-miraculous local circumstances which enable us to begin to understand it.All three pieces were commissioned for performance in Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle between 2013 and 2016, with computer music by Peter Zinovieff. Sun was part of NUSTEM's Imagining the Sun project for schools and the wider public (Northumbria University 2016). The title sequence, Edge, was broadcast as a Poetry Please Special on BBC Radio 4. Edge is Katrina Porteous's third poetry book from Bloodaxe, her first to draw upon her long involvement in scientific projects, following two earlier collections, The Lost Music (1996) and Two Countries (2014), concerned with the landscapes and communities of North-East England.

Edge

Bloodaxe Books

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

The author spent five years working and living along-side the fishermen in the Northumberland village of Beadnell, listening to their dialect, learning their ways. In a dialogue between her own voice and the fishermen's dialect, The Lost Music traces the identity of this fishing community, revealing loss of spiritual direction with the passing of the old ways of life. Her poems suggest the way forward is neither to cling to the past nor to abandon it, but to change and remember. One critic has said: There are poems here to take to heart and to have by heart.

The Lost Music

Two Countries is a book of poems about place: about landscape, community, and the shifting, provisional relations between them. Born in Scotland, Katrina Porteous grew up in North-East England. These poems explore the ambiguities of borderlands, from the Roman Wall to the present-day Anglo-Scottish Border, and the `debatable lands' between tradition and modernity, real and ideal, country and town, `nature' and `culture.' Since her first collection, The Lost Music (1996), Katrina Porteous has collaborated widely with artists and musicians. Much of her work has been for BBC radio, notably with producer Julian May, who describes her as `extending the boundaries of the genre.'

Two Countries

Quartet: The Four Seasons

Sail, Lawrence

Alvi, Moniza

Crucefix, Martyn

Khalvati, Mimi

Harvey, Matt

Brackenbury, Alison

France, Linda

Tutton, Chris

Schmit, Michael

Avalanche Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Porteous, Katrina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Porteous, Katrina