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The Lost Music

The Lost Music

by Katrina Porteous (Author)

  • Used

    Illustrated 1996

    $5.58

  • New

    Illustrated 1996

    $13.47
Synopsis

Katrina Porteous has been living and working alongside the fishermen of the Northumberland village of Beadnell for the past five 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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More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 64
 Edition: Illustrated
 Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Published: 29 Aug 1996
ISBN 10: 1852243805
ISBN 13: 9781852243807

Media Reviews
'Katrina Porteous returned to her native North-East, to an elected solitude on the Northumberland coast. She bears witness to the natural beauty and the industrial wreckage around her. What is rarer, she has also sought out the people there, in particular the dwindling fishing community, and out of this experience she has not only created memorable poems but performed an act of historical and linguistic retrieval. But whatever the subject, there is throughout an engagement with process - be it of natural growth and decay or of human love and mourning - that demands prolonged patience, careful observation and unwavering purpose. A rage for order informs the fashioning of these cadences which resonate in the memory. There are poems here to take to heart, and to have by heart' - Stephen Romer.
Author Bio
Katrina Porteous was born in Aberdeen in 1960, grew up in Co. Durham, and has lived at Beadnell in Northumberland since 1987. She read History at Cambridge and afterwards studied in the USA on a Harkness Fellowship. Her work appeared in Carol Rumens' Bloodaxe anthology New Women Poets in 1990. In 1989 she won a Gregory Award, and in 1993 an Arts Council Bursary. Many of the poems in her first collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe Books, 1996), deal with the fishing community of the Northumberland coast. Katrina is actively involved in local history, recording reminiscences of older people in the community. She also writes in Northumbrian dialect, and has recorded her long poem, The Wund an' the Wetter, on CD with piper Chris Ormston (Iron Press, 1999). Her latest poems are published in Turning the Tide, a collection of photographs and paintings recording the regeneration of the black beaches of east Durham (District of Easington, 2001). Her second full-length collection from Bloodaxe, Two Countries, is forthcoming in 2014. She has been involved in many collaborations with other artists, including public art for Seaham, County Durham with sculptor Michael Johnson, and inscriptions for Easington Colliery Memorial Garden. In 2000 she worked with composer Alistair Anderson on the musical Tam Lin, and collaborated on a film-poem for Poetry International at the Royal Festival Hall. Katrina has many years' experience leading poetry workshops for adults and children. She has been writer-in-residence from Cornwall to the Shetland Islands, as well as in schools in the United States.