The Lost Music
by Katrina Porteous
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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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Katrina Porteous has lived on the Northumberland coast since 1987. Many of the poems in her first collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe-Books, 1996), explore the Northumbrian fishing community. Katrina is actively involved in local history, recording the reminiscences of older people in the community, and also writes in Northumbrian dialect. She is show more President of the Northumbrian Language Society, and an ambassador for New Networks for Nature. She has worked on many collaborations with other artists, including public art for Seaham with sculptor Michael Johnson, the long poem The Wund an' the Wetter with piper Chris Ormston (1999), and the musical Tam Lin with composer Alistair Anderson (2000). Her most recent collaborations, with composer Peter Zinovieff, are Horse (2011), and Edge (2013), a poem in four moons with music incorporating sounds collected on space missions, broadcast on BBC Radio 4. show less
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