Local poet shortlisted for Britain’s biggest poetry prize
Katrina Porteous’s new poetry collection, Rhizodont (Bloodaxe Books), named after a fossil fish found on the Northumberland coast in 2007, has been shortlisted for the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize, awarded annually for the best new poetry collection published in the UK and Ireland.
Katrina Porteous at Amble Puffin Festival
Katrina, who lives at Beadnell, has a long association with Amble, which began with a stint as a poet visiting schools in 1990. Her work is well-known around the town: lines appear in the town square, a poem is displayed at the harbour, and a sequence of her work is included in podcasts with Geoff Sample for the Amble Bord Waalk app. Her poems featured in BBC Radio 4’s Open Country: The Bord Waalk of Amble in October 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nvtc . These bird poems now appear in her new book.
“I called my book Rhizodont because it’s all about survival, extinctions and transformations,” Katrina explains.
“The first part is a journey along the North-East coast, from the former coal-mining communities of Durham to North Northumberland where the rhizodont’s fossil was found. I wanted to set familiar places and wildlife, like the birds of Amble harbour, against a backdrop of vast geological time, and our own recent coal-mining, fossil-fuel burning history. The book addresses social and environmental change.”
The second part of Rhizodont is quite different, dealing with global technological developments like robotics and AI, and with the massive cycles of Earth’s climate.
“I’m interested in how, at a local level, we adapt to global change,” Katrina says.
“Amble is a place which has changed hugely, from coal staithes and railway lines to an increasingly busy tourist destination, while its fishing industry constantly negotiates change. Many of these poems consider how familiar local cultures or words, like ‘creeve’ for a lobster pot or ‘Cuddy’s duck’ for the eider – change and survive, or vanish, against a background of global developments.”
Being shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize has come as a wonderful surprise to Katrina.
“It’s a fantastic affirmation,” she says. “My work is informed by many different voices: fishing families, former coal mining communities, as well as the scientists whose work I studied for the book. Displacement is a major theme in poetry, but these are the opposite: poems of place – places which are not often heard from in London. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who inspired or commissioned these poems – including Amble Development Trust and my publishers, Bloodaxe Books.”
Readings by the ten poets shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 will take place in the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 12 January. The winner of the £25,000 award will be announced at a ceremony in London on 13 January.
Rhizodont is available from Bloodaxe Books, price £12.99.
