Katrina Porteous is one of our best poets and her big new book of poems Two Countries is surely one of the most distinctive and important collections of the year. 

It is certainly one of the most long-awaited. It almost 20 years since she published her last full-length collection The Lost Music, about the decline of the fishing communities on the Northumbrian coast where she lives.

Two Countries brings together many of the poems she has written since then — commissions, community projects, collaborations with musicians and visual artists — which have been published in magazines, newspapers, chapbooks, short-collections and anthologies.

It is worth buying this beautiful book just for the texts alone of some of the extraordinary poems she has written for BBC Radio, notably This Far and No Further, An Ill Wind, Borderers, Dunstanburgh, Durham Cathedral, Beach Ride, When the Tide Comes and The Refuge Box.

Like the radio ballads of Charles Parker, AL Lloyd, Peggy Seeger and Ewan McColl, these long poems combine documentary footage, recorded speech, bird-song, folk-song, wind, weather and a chorus of many-layered voices. 

They draw on Border ballads, folklore, history, myth, geology, ornithology and memory and employ a mixture of Standard English, Northumbrian dialect, Pitmatic and Border Scots.

Two Countries is a collection about landscape and people and the “conversation between them and their environment.” In many ways it is a book of elegies, solemn and fierce laments for the fishermen, hill farmers, lead-miners and boat-builders of Northumbria and County Durham, whose ways of living and working and speaking have been lost in our lifetimes: “Once they capped the colliery shaft, it was goodbye ships and steel... Then the fishing fleet burned on the beach and it’s farewell all our boats:/And now it’s the power to feed ourselves that’s going up in flames and smoke.”

Lost Names is a simple litany of place-names, pits, jobs, birds and fishing coble boats that have disappeared — Vane Tempest, redshank, hewer, oystercatcher, putter, The Lady Anne. As Porteous asks: “Wha wad a thowt the world wad shrink sae quickly?”

The “two countries” of the collection’s title are England and Scotland, both sides of Hadrian’s Wall, both sides of the Tweed. But this is a book also about town and country, the traditional and the new, the pre-industrial and the post-industrial, about RP and northern dialect, print and speech, class and alienation — “Aye hinny. It’s a different country now.” 

On the one hand there is the daily struggle against the “slant wind” and “the sea’s indifference.” On the other, there are the reivers — foot-and-mouth, deep-sea trawlers, Defra, the Common Agricultural and Fisheries policies and pit-closures: “The reivers have been and taken our sheep and cattle/And tied our hands,/And the brambles ravel like wires, and the fells blacken/To No Man’s Land.”

Older than the reivers — border raiders of the 17th century on — are the “Romans,” who came “Like a bunch of thieves,/Boned our land/Like a side of beef,/Built their camps/Where our steadings lay:/It’s the Romans get the plenty and the farmer pays... Now regulations/Grow thick as weeds/And nobody asks us/And nobody agrees: But when in Rome/It’s the Roman way — /It’s the Roman gets the plenty and the farmer pays./And it’s more paper and less sense,/and it’s more bureaucracy to plough through;/And it’s more moor and fewer farms,/And it’s more authorities to bow to.”

If these poems are a record of change, they are also a hymn to what doesn’t change, like the rooks in St Mary’s churchyard in Seaham: “Witnesses to Londonderry’s riches,/To the town’s prosperity and the pitman’s graft — Those dark tides of sons and fathers, leaving, returning/From the pit shaft... they are onlookers/To great catastrophes: wars, strikes; to private hearts/Smashed like pebbles in the wreck of wave and water.”

Above all, Porteous insists on the wisdom that “From the slate to the keyboard” survives: “Not what we own/But where we belong... Not what we buy/But what we become/Not what is consumed/But what we keep building... Between the printed sand/And the far horizon... Where we choose to sail/Where we put out to sea.”

Two Countries is published by Bloodaxe Books, price £12,  bloodaxebooks.com