A chapbook - By Annette Skade
A Chapbook published by Channel, Ireland’s leading journal of eco-writing, was launched at Bantry Library as part of the Festival. Holdfast is a poetic sequence arising from a study by poet, Annette Skade, of seaweed and the life and work of Ellen Hutchins. The setting of Bantry Library was very apt, as it was where Annette had first seen books and letters of Ellen’s that drew her into Ellen’s story.
Confined by lockdown to her home in Bantry Bay and witnessing its changing face in a time of environmental degradation, Annette Skade began to comb the landscape and archives of her locality in search of connection to the life of one of its most famous residents: nineteenth-century botanist Ellen Hutchins, who collected hundreds of seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts and discovered several new species in the course of a short life spent tied to Bantry as a carer for her mother and brother.
Holdfast is the fruit of this creative inquiry – a poetic sequence taking its shape from the algae studied by Ellen, moving from tip to anchor-point; an act of friendship across centuries, and a paean both to the work of a great scientist and to the resilience of seaweed.
Do support your local bookshop if you can, or it can be bought online from the publisher here:
