#naturepoems

Rhizodont

The ‘rhizodont’, whose name means ‘rooted teeth’, was a fearsome three-metre-long predatory fish which first appeared around 377 million years ago and became extinct 310 million years ago. A creature of swampy lakes, it belonged to a family of lobe-finned fishes which are the ancestors of all four-limbed vertebrates, including humans. The lobe-finned fishes’ transition from water to land was one of the most significant events in vertebrate evolution. A rhizodont’s fossil has been found in Carboniferous strata from around 330 million years ago at Cocklawburn on the Northumberland coast.

Transition is a central theme of Rhizodont, my new poetry collection from Bloodaxe, published on June 27^th. The book is in two parts. The first, ‘Carboniferous’, is a journey through the sedimentary landscapes of England’s North-East coast. The poems begin in the former coal-mining communities of East Durham, where the Carboniferous strata lie buried deep beneath newer rock, and travel north, to the shores of Northumberland just south of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Along the way they explore places and communities in transformation: the mouth of the Tyne, the former coal port of Amble, and the fishing and former quarrying and lime-burning settlements of Beadnell and Holy Island. The poems consider these places against a backdrop of geological time.

Book II, ‘Invisible Everywhere’, is arranged around two long sequences written in collaboration with scientists, and considers aspects of the latest waves of industrial and technological revolution, in particular technologies which extend human senses and reasoning in completely new ways. The first sequence, ‘Ingenious’, explores the remote sensing techniques, robotics and autonomous systems which allow humans to interact with hazardous environments, such as outer space. These poems consider the implications of data-based technologies and artificial intelligence, and the understanding of complex systems, as new ways of thinking about the Earth and its ecology.

The closing sequence, ‘Under the Ice’, focuses on the most inaccessible reaches of our planet, Antarctica, and the unseen worlds beneath its miles-deep ice. These poems explore in detail how the same remote sensing technologies and data analysis are used to understand more about our planet’s systems, in particular its climate, and its patterns of change.

In the background to all the poems in Rhizodont is the notion that the generation born in the decades immediately after World War II occupies a unique place in history, straddling the transition from analogue to digital technologies. Like the lobe-finned fishes, we have crawled from one ‘world’ into another. At different scales the poems in Rhizodont explore these changes, by which – like living creatures – communities, languages and cultures may flourish, evolve or become extinct.

Rhizodont contains work written over the last ten years. You can pre-order it HERE. I’m extremely grateful to all the scientists, naturalists, organisations and individuals who have helped make it possible. With special thanks to editor Neil Astley, cover designer Pamela Robertson-Pearce, and Newcastle-based artist Paul Kenny for his wonderful cover image, ‘Mapping the Strandline – Sea, Metal, Plastic, 2016’.

The Lapwing Act

In his marvellous book, In Search of One Last Song, Patrick Galbraith travels around Britain in search of disappearing birds such as the capercaillie, lapwing, nightingale and turtle dove. Rather than consulting university-educated scientists, Patrick listens to the people he meets along the way: reed-cutters, coppicers, hedge-layers, crofters and deer-stalkers, whose traditional work or craft has always involved conservation, but whose voices usually go unheard, and whose way of life is often as threatened as the birds themselves.

I was very privileged to meet Patrick on his travels and to be one of his interviewees. Now a chapter from In Search of One Last Song has been adapted for the London stage. The Lapwing Act is co-edited by Eloïse Poulton and Patrick himself, and staged by Anthony Biggs. Including video design by Matt Feldman, sculptures created by Jack Anthony Taylor, and improvised sound design by Dom Bouffard, it promises to ‘fly audiences through time and place from Rochdale to West Wales, via canals, motorway flyovers, and the Manchester Mosses.’

Each night after the performance Patrick will be ‘in conversation’ with other writers, including Tom Pickard and Emily Oldfield (May 10), Noreen Masood (May 11), and me and Richard Smyth (The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell — May 12).

The Lapwing Act is on at The Playground Theatre, 8 Latimer Industrial Estate, 343 – 453 Latimer Road, London W10 6RQ, from May 10-12 at 7.30pm.

Patrick Galbraith in Conversation with Richard Smyth and Katrina Porteous, May 12. Tickets £15 and £10.

It will be a great evening. Please come if you can. You can book HERE.

Under the Ice

My final collaboration with the late Peter Zinovieff had its long-delayed in-person premiere at the Gallery @ No 6 in Wooler on Saturday night. The event was organised by Wooler Arts, at the invitation of composer John Casken, who controlled the mix of my voice with Peter’s electronic music. The sound quality was excellent, and the audience of about 25 very appreciative. Greg Freeman has written a lovely review of the event for Write Out Loud, which you can read HERE.

Performing ‘Under the Ice’. Photo by Greg Freeman, Write Out Loud

The Bird Roads

Amble Bord Waalk sculpture trail will officially open to the public in June with a visit from a member of the Royal Family. You can read the latest news about The Bird Roads, my collaboration with sound artist Geoff Sample, on page 19 of The Ambler, HERE.

On Sunday May 28 I’ll be performing poems from The Bird Roads in Amble as part of the Puffin Festival. Time and venue to be confirmed. Click HERE for details soon.

After Hours with the Artists, Tuesday May 30, 5-6.30pm, Lindisfarne Priory Museum

In 2022 English Heritage commissioned me and producer Julian May to create a new version of our radio-poem The Refuge Box for the brand new Museum at Lindisfarne Priory. The Museum opened to the public a few weeks ago, and you can hear our 13-minute audio installation in a specially-designed space inside it. You can also download the full 30 minute version from a QR code available there. The poem focuses on the refuge intended for travellers caught by the tide while crossing the sands to Holy Island. It features local voices, and considers the Island itself as a sanctuary, together with wider ideas of refuge and migration. The installation is intended to be heard alongside a major new artwork by Olivia Lomenech Gill, which hangs in the Museum next to the listening space. Here it is:

Olivia Lomenech Gill’s new work for the Lindisfarne Priory Museum

On May 30, you can join Olivia and me in conversation with Susan Harrison (Collections Curator) and Ruth Haycock (Interpretation Manager) as we discuss our work, the commission as part of the new museum experience, and our shared love for the island. The in-conversation event will be followed by a short Q&A session.

Tickets cost £15 and include entry to the Museum. You can book HERE.

A book signing will also take place between 3pm and 4pm at the Priory. Olivia and I will be signing copies of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Bloomsbury Children’s Books) and Two Countries (Bloodaxe Books). Pre-booking is not required.

Chris Killip

On Wednesday April 12 I talked live to Nick Ahad on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row about the wonderful retrospective exhibition of photographs by Chris Killip at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle, which continues until September 3. Chris’s powerful, tender black and white images featuring sea-coalers, small boat fishermen and street scenes around Wallsend, Tyneside and Middlesbrough had a profound impact on me at an early stage of my writing life in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Killip took great care to embed himself within the communities with whom he worked, remaining friends with many of the people and families he photographed. Recognised as a leading postwar documentary photographer, he died in October 2020. Before my visit to the BBC’s Newcastle studio I spent a very happy afternoon at Baltic, immersed in this retrospective, which begins with work from Chris’s native Isle of Man, then concentrates on his time in Northeast England, a period which ended with his influential collection, In Flagrante. I marvelled in particular at the contrasting formality and spontaneity of Chris’s photographs: the careful geometric arrangements of landscape, building and horizon, dark and light, and the exuberant human energy of people at work or passing through.

I grew up on the edge of Consett, a steel town; so Chris’s image of two small girls sharing confidences on the kerbside in the shadow of Middlesbrough’s steelworks reminded me strongly of those red dust days. I heard many visitors to the exhibition make similar personal observations: ‘Eeh, that’s where your Granda worked!’ In my discussion with Nick I reflect on this; on Chris Killip’s self-accusation of ‘voyeurism’ and his strenuous efforts to avoid it by winning people’s trust and demonstrating his care and commitment to them. I consider how he makes the invisible values of community and belonging so visible in his photographs, and reflect on the love which imbues his work. I could have said a great deal more about how much has changed since that historical era of pit heaps, coal smoke skies and ‘deindustrialisation’ — and in terms of economic inequality and unheard voices, how little.

Incidentally, I first discovered Chris Killip’s work in the late 1970s at Newcastle’s Side Gallery, which Chris helped to found with Murray Martin’s influential Amber Collective. I am very sorry, therefore, to hear of its recent closure. The Side Gallery has done so much over decades to bring attention to unheard voices, nationally and internationally. I wish that I’d been able to mention this in the interview.

You can hear my thoughts on the Chris Killip retrospective at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art towards the end of Front Row, Wednesday April 12, HERE (from 31.50). Also on the programme, Max Porter discusses his new novel, Shy; opera director Adele Thomas reflects on what a stage director earns, and Kevin Sampson talks about his new true crime drama, The Hunt for Raoul Moat. The programme was produced by Ekene Akalawu.