Annette Skade: Holdfast

Time and date

Thursday 17 July 2025

11:30 am

Location

Bantry Bookshop

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Annette Skade’s poetry chapbook Holdfast originated during the lockdown when she was confined to the area around her home in Bantry Bay. It is a moving tribute to the nineteenth-century botanist Ellen Hutchins, to the Bantry coastline and to the resilience of seaweed. Holdfast is the debut standalone chapbook from Channel, Ireland’s leading journal of eco-writing,

Admission: Free

Confined by lockdown to her home in Bantry Bay and witnessing its changing face in a time of environmental degradation, Annette 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. Her poetry chapbook 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.

 

 

Writer

Annette Skade

Annette Skade was born in Manchester and has lived for many years lived on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork. Her award winning first collection, Thimblerig, was published by Bradshaw...

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