Rhizodont

<p><strong><em>Winner of The Laurel Prize 2025</em></strong></p><p><strong><em>Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024</em></strong></p><p><strong>Against 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. </strong></p><p>330 million years ago what is now the rocky shore close to Katrina Porteous''s Northumberland home in the north of England was a tropical swamp inhabited by three-metre long predatory fish with huge tusk-like teeth. They belonged to a family of lobe-finned fishes which evolved to move on land as well as swim, and which are the ancestors of all four-limbed vertebrates, including humans. The fossil fish found in Northumberland is called the ''rhizodont''.</p><p>Porteous''s new collection begins with a lovingly-observed contemporary journey through these ancient landscapes, from the former coal-mining communities of the Durham coast, where the coal-bearing Carboniferous strata are overlain with younger rocks, to the Northumberland shores where the rhizodont''s remains were found. Against a backdrop of vast geological time and recent fossil-fuel burning history, these poems address current issues of social and environmental change. They are followed by two sequences about aspects of the latest technological revolution - autonomous systems and AI, and the remote-sensing techniques used to explore the most inaccessible reaches of our planet, Antarctica, to measure Earth''s changing climate.</p><p>The poems unfold from England''s North-East coast into global questions of evolution, survival and extinction - in communities and languages, and throughout the natural world, where hope resides in Life''s astonishing powers of reinvention.</p><p><em>Rhizodont </em>is Katrina Porteous''s fourth poetry collection from Bloodaxe, and extends territory explored in her three previous books. It combines scientific themes from <em>Edge</em> (2019) with the ecological localism of <em>Two Countries</em> (2014) and <em>The Lost Music</em> (1996), both of which were concerned with the landscapes and communities of North-East England. <em>Rhizodont </em>won the Laurel Prize 2025 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024.</p>