Katrina Porteous Boeken

Katrina Porteous has lived in the Northumberland village of Beadnell for the past thirty years, formerly home to a centuries-old fishing community. Half the poems in The Lost Music celebrate her love of the place and its people. Her first collection also includes some of her own drawings featuring both fishing and industry in decline as well the wildlife of North-East England. All her poems are strongly physical in character, written to be read aloud. They take as their starting-point the tensions between time and eternity, change and stillness. In language which is both passionate and controlled, they express the endless struggle to discover new forms of order. The fishing poems develop these themes within a microcosm of the wider world. In a dialogue between her own voice and the fishermen's dialect, Katrina Porteous traces the identity of the community in its common memory and working practices, finding with the passing of the old ways of life a loss of spiritual direction. The poems suggest the way forward is neither to cling to the past nor to abandon it, but to change and remember.

Inspired by recent advances in space science, 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.

Poems about place, landscape, community and borderlands, including a selection of Porteous's renowned radio work, featuring hill farmers caught up in the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic and Northumberland fishermen.

This book mainly covers the period 1900 to 1950 when the fishing industry was thriving and Seahouses was a working town. The sea, fisher life and fisher folk as well as the harbour and the lifeboat therefore dominate this book although it also includes old images of the town's streets almost devoid of life, unlike today when Seahouses teems with tourists.

Against a backdrop of vast geological time and recent fossil-fuel burning history, Porteous’s Northumberland poems explore issues of social and environmental change. These are followed by sequences on technological revolution – autonomous systems, AI, and remote-sensing techniques used to measure Earth’s changing climate in the Antarctic.