Correspondence inspires poems
Self-Preservation
“Preserve yourself with care, I beseech you.”
D.T. to Ellen Hutchins, 17th October 1813
Pressed between sheets of blotting paper
or pinned, wingless and silent,
under glass?
She could lie among apples in a straw-lined
box or with parsnips nestled
in sawdust
She could hide from the cold, under a cloche,
nesting in a bed of freshest moss.
So many ways.
Cured in the smokehouse, laid out
in the icehouse or soaked in a barrel
of brine.
Candied, jellied, pickled or potted, or fixed
in a gobbet of fat. But no. Not that,
not after all.
She will seal herself like a precious seed, in yellow
beeswax, bring to him scent of honey, spiced
pollen and warm cedar, a final gift.
Laura McKenna, poet and writer, composed a series of poems written in response to phrases in Ellen’s letters to English botanist, Dawson Turner, and his letters to her. One poem, Self-Preservation (above) is in response to a sentence written by Dawson Turner to Ellen when she had told him how ill she had been. Laura McKenna takes up the story:
“This poem was inspired by a line from Dawson Turner’s letter to Ellen on 17th October 1813. It struck me as very moving. But in giving voice to Ellen, I thought of how often there was humour in their correspondence and so her ‘response’ is a consideration of preservation methods of the period.”
Join novelist Marianne Lee and poet Laura McKenna in conversation with Finola Finlay (Roaringwater Journal). The video includes readings from A Quiet Tide by Marianne Lee and poems by Laura McKenna, inspired by Ellen’s correspondence with Dawson Turner, and the landscape and natural world of the Beara Peninsula. Watch the video (1hr 26min) for free here.
This recording is of a webinar which was first broadcast on Tuesday 18th August 2020 as part of the Ellen Hutchins Virtual Festival 2020.
John FitzGerald’s poem, Velvet Horn, was written after a visit to the Ellen Hutchins exhibition in the Boole Library at UCC in 2018.
“Velvet Horn was inspired by Ellen’s life, but more particularly by the exceptional nature of her voice in her correspondence with Dawson Turner. Both correspond with such affection, almost intimacy at times, yet Ellen manages always to balance her enthusiasm with a polite restraint that I find heart breaking. I have tried to capture and animate all this in the poem, including by including a number of verbatim phrases of hers from their correspondence.”
Velvet Horn
Back home again,
I find another life in liverworts, lichens, ferns,
at Esknamucky and around the bay
and talking with you all the while.
I paint and write and botanise a good deal
in the dark hours — mine and theirs,
and there is always the bay
and what the post may bring from you
and my microscopic finds.
Few appreciate how I live
for these exquisite little beauties, my treasures —
a minor cryptogam subsisting among
butterwort, alexanders, hungry sundew.
Lately, I spent five days admiring just one
and wished often your eye had been in place of mine,
but was consoled to read
you had admired my Ulva verticillata.
I wish indeed that
you could visit some of the rocks with me.
I send you this Fucus tomentosus,
knowing it is nowhere near as beautiful
as what I found.