{"id":2328,"date":"2020-08-23T11:35:22","date_gmt":"2020-08-23T11:35:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2328"},"modified":"2020-08-24T13:56:51","modified_gmt":"2020-08-24T13:56:51","slug":"katrina-porteous-edge-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2328","title":{"rendered":"Katrina Porteous, Edge – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Katrina Porteous\u2019s Edge<\/em> tries to digest the most abstruse science into poetic form.<\/p>\n

I found it thrilling. There\u2019s no self in it, and almost no people, but it doesn\u2019t feel inhuman because Porteous uses different forms of personification so much. She opens with an account of the poems\u2019 genesis and closes with scientific notes. These I sometimes found interesting, sometimes indigestible. The poems themselves are in three sections. \u2018Field\u2019 explores the quantum physics underlying all reality \u2013 science of a kind incomprehensible to most of us; \u2018Sun\u2019 meditates on our sun, and \u2018Edge\u2019 focuses on our own moon and some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Further complexities of structure will only be felt with repeated reading but the beauty of most of the individual poems leapt out at me immediately.<\/p>\n

This was because Porteous has a gift for quietly startling metaphor and handles free verse in a brilliantly fluent, precise and varied way. An example of the delight to be found in her rhythms would be this from \u2018Various Uncertainties II\u2019, where exquisitely precise pacing causes ideas and images to flower in the mind almost word by word but \u2013 and this is crucial \u2013 never in isolation, always with a strong, almost kinetic sense of the unfolding of the syntax between them:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is elsewhere, the party;
\nThe ghostly
\nImmaterial numbers<\/p>\n

Dancing all night
\nIn the mirrored ballroom,
\nOr gazing transfixed<\/p>\n

At their own beauty.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When it comes to the kind of physical reality we can or theoretically could experience directly with our senses, Edwin Morgan\u2019s great \u2018Moons of Jupiter\u2019 sequence brought the terrifying strangeness and extremity of physical conditions on those moons home to me more hauntingly than anything in this book. Porteous\u2019s main interest is not in such phenomena but in the elusiveness of the cosmic and subatomic forces behind them. In the introduction she refers to Plato\u2019s belief that \u2018we cannot see true reality, only its partial image\u2019. Her poems create imaginative bridges between realities directly available to our senses and the vaster or deeper ones that we can only approach by abstract thought or through sophisticated instruments. I can\u2019t claim that reading the book helped me understand the scientific theories and discoveries behind it, but there\u2019s a keen delight in the verbal music and the stream of images that they\u2019ve drawn from the poet.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Katrina Porteous, Edge<\/em>, 128pp, \u00a312, Bloodaxe Books, Eastburn, South Park, Hexham, Northumberland NE46 1BS<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I would like to thank Ann and Peter Sansom and Suzannah Evans for permission to post this extract from my review of books by Katrina Porteous, Mimi Khalvati, Mary Jean Chan and Hugo Williams in issue 64 of The North.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katrina Porteous\u2019s Edge tries to digest the most abstruse science into poetic form. I found it thrilling. There\u2019s no self in it, and almost no people, but it doesn\u2019t feel inhuman because Porteous uses different forms of personification so much. She opens with an account of the poems\u2019 genesis and closes with scientific notes. These […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[158],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-katrina-porteous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2328"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2328"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2334,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2328\/revisions\/2334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}