Search results for ""Author Katrina Porteous""

Katrina Porteous has been living and working alongside the fishermen of the Northumberland village of Beadnell for the past thirty years. 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.

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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.

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