Chrissie Gittins

drawing with light

If the day is bright then five to seven minutes will suffice.
Once exposed, the paper – J. Whatman’s Turkey Mill –

is washed with Kentish water. The Prussian blue
comes into its own when dry.

All those days of collecting at Whitstable and Deal,
swapping specimens with dear friends,

cleaning under water with forceps and camel’s-hair brushes,
drying, placing, rescuing the more mucilaginous types;

they came together in images of nodular filigree,
feathered bronchioles, fragile gossamer.

My father would’ve wanted me to continue to completion,
it took a full ten years.

I dedicated the volume to him, Photographs of British Algae,
my whole life without a mother made him mine.

To Anne I gave British and Foreign Flowering Plants And Ferns.
For days after father died she stood by me,

handing feather, lace, fern.
She could not make the water warm,

she could not mend the skeleton leaves,
but she did shorten the days so that a Tuesday in July

seemed only as long as a Friday in December.
Released from cataloguing algae,

I took delight in iris, dandelion, poppy.
Those plates lie unbound, scattered

and blooming in corners near and far from Halstead –
my radiant home.

Chrissie Gittins’ poetry collections are Armature (Arc), I’ll Dress One Night As You (Salt) and Sharp Hills (Indigo Dreams). She appeared on BBC Countryfile with her fifth children’s collection, Adder Bluebell, Lobster (Otter-Barry Books). She has received Arts Council and Author’s Foundation awards and features on the Poetry Archive. Her recent poems are published in Perverse, Bad Lilies, Acumen, and in the anthologies Women On Nature (Unbound), Wonder (Natural History Museum/Macmillan) and Empty Nest (Picador). Her latest pamphlet was longlisted in the Paper Swans competition.

Chrissie wrote the following about ‘Drawing With Light’:

I’ve long been entranced by the ethereal beauty of Ann Atkins’ cyanotypes. She self-published  ‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions’ in 1843; it is said to be the first book to have photographic illustrations. I was able to look at two of the seventeen copies known to exist in the libraries of the Horniman Museum and the Royal Society. These libraries also provided me with the technical and biographical details found in the poem which allowed me to imagine myself into her life.