Katrina Porteous is reading at Berwick Literary Festival on 12 October (with Sarah Holland-Batt & Niall Campbell). TS Eliot Prize Readings on 12 January 2025.
Interviews with Katrina Porteous in The Friday Poem & The QT for her fourth collection Rhizodont; reviews in Write Out Loud & New Writing North; BBC Radio 4 feature...
How far they have travelled.
Farther than the pilgrim
Worrying a crinoid rosary.
Farther than the blue-eyed sailor,
A tarred rope in one fist,
In the other, a knife.
Farther than papyrus
From smashed pillar,
Scorched ochre; farther
Than any of these, they have come,
A glittering ice-storm
From the frayed ends of the Earth.
Their clockwork din the racket
Of endless summer,
Their wings’ white nights, the Sun
And Moon’s altercation,
Their hollow bones inscribing
Pages of skeer and carr,
Strangers all, they alight
Here, on the North Shore,
Knowing what we cannot –
To answer as one flock,
Floating between its farthest
Past and remotest future
Where the bent-grass root
Binds, for a time,
The thing in flight –
Even the grass, xylem and water,
Chlorophyll, light.
*
Holy Island, Northumberland Begin Again
Out on the Slakes between two tides, a fresh start
Opens before you – cold, rippled, salt
All the way to the steely breakers. One long thought:
How astonishing to be alive. To walk together
On the worm-knotted sand, light scudding over it, some
Pleistocene colony howling distantly,
A blue bead in an inky ocean. Astonishing to know it,
Telescoped into the hollow of your skull, light
Sizzling starry between the synapses, and at your feet
Countless splintered mirrors, glittering. You’re suddenly glad
Of tea-cups, hands, companionable laughter,
The Sun breaking through, your friendships’ watch and compass –
Your prints disappearing in the amnesiac mud, as if
None of it mattered as much as you thought it did.
*
Cocklawburn, Northumberland Cocklawburn
Kids from Scremerston
Hang out in the dunes with bottles.
Somebody’s children
Have been here a long time,
Rearranging the archive. Playful
Gods, so old they have forgotten
Their names, making themselves visible,
Mixing themselves different
Each time, a new gadget:
Star, whorl, ladder, spiral,
Stuttering, repeating itself, never
The same – a handful
Of sand. Coral, pink flower, relic animal
Pretending to be rock, fossil –
Photo in mineral.
Yes, this is Cocklawburn, pick-axed, coal-nibbled,
Carbon black, furnace-fired, flipped
On its head. At night you can feel
Some current drag you, while the stars
Glint, innumerable
As sand grains, with the whole
Machine on shuffle.
*
Cocklawburn, Northumberland #rhizodont
Then, in a flash,
It claps shut – an ambush –
Teeth, fangs, tusks – crunch, rip,
Snap. The rhizodont,
Dragging itself out of water.
The old world sinks and slips
Beneath its tilted strata.
We’re all on a journey.
This one’s about us
Unearthing ourselves from a place –
Somatic, interlaced –
To be conjured from light, and sent
Invisible, everywhere,
For everyone to possess.
The children stare at their phones,
A fervent, lit up,
Incorporeal congregation,
Some deep, residual
Root in a life everlasting
Outlasting them, like a fossil
Sarcopterygian fish.
Contents List
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