The Monthly interviews Linda McKenna about her new collection, “Four Thousand Keys” – Part 2 – Themes of invisibility, motherhood, the rivers and the sea.

Are there any devices you like using in your writing?

I am interested in using “mirroring” in poems where there will be a line at the beginning of the poem which might reappear towards the middle or the end. And I quite like circular poems where there is a loop from beginning to end, rather than a beginning, middle and an end; an obvious narrative.

What were the major themes which emerge in this latest work?

I think I was most interested in investigating women’s access to institutions, not just in the past but today as well; access to politics, to the banks, money and finances, access to those formal institutions and organisations.

I was also interested in the relationship between parents and grown-up children. Elizabeth Dunham’s children were grown up, one of her daughters was married. My son is grown-up, so I was thinking that the relationship between parents and small children is completely different to that of the relationship to children once they become adults.

I suppose I was asking the question around what happens when your children are so grown up, that you are no longer a mother in the sense that they need you in the same way as they needed you when they were little. One of the things Elizabeth Dunham said was that, “I have lots of family, but no friends.” I think she meant that she had plenty of people she was connected to by blood, but no-one that she felt emotionally connected to. I wanted to explore that idea, that theme.

I was also interested in exploring the relationship between people and the past, and their past. I often use historical documents to create poems and I hope that by exploring the past it will have something, some relevance, to what is happening today

Going on from what you have just said, If I understood this work correctly, there were poems looking at the “maternal”. Is that reasonable to say?

There are a series of questions which arise from this relationship shift as children become adults. There is an invisibility which accompanies many women when their children are no longer with them. As a women moves through middle age and becomes elderly, and I don’t mean here the general invisibility of women, but the specific shifts which take place as women age.

Elizabeth Dunham was able to steal all these keys from major institutions and I think it was partly due to her “invisibility”. That she had reached a stage of her life where few people paid any attention to her actions.

I thought also that the sea, or the theme of the sea, was evident in some of the work?

It’s quite strange because I can’t swim and I have little or no interest in the sea, and yet the sea is in there, or many references to the sea. There are also a lot of feathers in my work and I don’t know where that comes from either. I was frightened of feathers when I was a child and so maybe that is the reason why feathers appear quite prominently in my poetry.

Beyond that, there is the question of the sea and rivers. Because she was from London, the river there is immensely important, and that allows some ideas to creep through. Rivers were a lot more important in the past than they are today because they were crucial to trade and the movement of goods.

The sea is very unknowable, but rivers are knowable. The sea holds a lot more danger in it than the river does, and that is something I wanted to explore as well, although how that connects to the main themes I’m not entirely sure.

What happens now?

I’m doing a lot of readings, going to Literary Festivals and I have teamed up with a couple of poets, Emma McKervey and Kelly Creighton, and we are going to be reading together. Their collections are also on themes about women as well, so that will be a good combination.

Other than that, people can get the book from Doire Press, (see the link below) and if people are around when I’m reading obviously it would be great for them to come along to those events.