Rhizodont

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024Against 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.350 million years ago what is now the rocky shore close to Katrina Porteouss Northumberland home was a tropical swamp inhabited by three-metre long predatory fish with huge tusk-like teeth. Able to move on land as well as swim, such lobe-finned fishes are the ancestors of all four-limbed vertebrates, including humans. This fossil fish is called the rhizodont.Porteouss new collection begins with a lovingly-observed contemporary journey through these ancient Carboniferous landscapes, from the former coal-mining communities of the Durham coast to the Northumberland shores where the rhizodonts remains were found.Rhizodontextends territory explored in Porteouss three previous books. Combining scientific themes fromEdgewith the ecological localism ofTwo CountriesandThe Lost Music, these poems unfold from Englands North-East coast into global questions of evolution, survival and extinction in communities and languages, and throughout the natural world, where hope resides in lifes astonishing powers of reinvention.