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.
About the Author
Annette Skade was born in Manchester and has lived for many years on Ireland’s southwest coast. Her award winning first collection, Thimblerig, was published by Bradshaw Books in 2013. In 2021 she received a doctorate from Dublin City University for her research on the poetry of Anne Carson. Her poems appear in poetry magazines and anthologies in Ireland, the UK, the US and Australia.
Cover art from seaweed by Marina Dmitrik