on Katrina Porteous and Stephen Sawyer

Looking backwards to go forwards

At a reading series I frequent, performing poets are advised that preambles should not outrun the pieces themselves. True, but complex constraints and processes require explanation, and extracts of a wider project or residency demand context. Sometimes we need to be shown the bigger picture.

Katrina Porteous gives us an entire gallery tour. With four pages of introduction, a further thirty pages of endnotes and acknowledgements, and reams of footnotes, I feared being overwhelmed. Confident, knowing the existence of collaborations and commissions, audio sequences (Porteous being known for her ‘radio-poetry’) and responses to scientific research, I ditched flicking back and forth, and dug in.

Straight off, I was grabbed by the glowworms of ‘Tiny Lights’ – ‘Mysterious in the twenty-first century – alien, ancient’ – as mesmerised as the observers who ‘waited, like brigands, for the dark’ but who are dragged back to the present day as ‘Not a mile away, a police siren wailed’. We encounter much in the way of nature through Rhizodont: dragonflies, hedgehogs, hermit crabs, anemones, orchids, ‘gigantic ferns / And spidery horsetails’, ‘Painted Ladies’ butterflies ‘Flickering from knapweed to thistle-top, they rise’, seasonal ‘Sand Martins’, ‘their little blunt faces / Bursting into the light’.

The pages are teeming with birds, from the domesticated stobbies and skyemmies pigeons (reminiscent of Liz Berry’s lilting ‘Birmingham Roller’) to the wild visitors, often given their Northumbrian names, such as the tern (tirrick, tarree, teerum, pickie) and the eider: ‘Cubby, ye’re a bonny bord. Mild, an’ ower-soft, / Wallerin’ doon the ooze wi’ yer sea-byet ...