Katrina Porteous, "The Sea's the Boss

The language spoken by the Northumbrian 'coble' fishing community in the late 20th century contained clues to that community's historical development and to its understanding of place and nature. In this talk, touching on the language of fishing practices and species caught, place names, navigation and visualization of the seabed, taboo words and beliefs, Katrina Porteous will argue that elements of this way of life have remained little changed since medieval times, and that recent developments in fishing technology, reflected inits language, have profoundly altered the relation between people and place. With illustrations from her poems, she will show that an intrinsic understanding of 'sustainability' lay at the heart of the coble fishing way of life, and explore the human cost at which this was achieved.

Poet and historian Katrina Porteous lives on the Northumberland coast and writes from a deep commitment to the ecology of place and local community. Her collections from Bloodaxe Books include The Lost Music (1996), Two Countries (2014), and poems written for a planetarium, Edge (2019). www.katrinaporteous.co.uk