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LINDA MCKENNA was brought up in Kinsealy in North County Dublin and educated at Malahide Community School, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Leicester. Following six years spent working in Leicester, she moved to Northern Ireland in 1993, and has lived in Downpatrick for over twenty years. Linda began writing in 2015 and has had poems published in a variety of journals. In 2018 she won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing and the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition. Her work has also been shortlisted for the 2017 Eyewear Twelve Poems for Christmas competition and highly commended in the 2018 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition. This is her first collection.
Winner of the 2020 Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year Award
A beautiful book and an outstanding debut collection.
— Moyra Donaldson
In the Museum of Misremembered Things
the keeper writes a slanted hand; fine nibbed copperplate tracking
imagined lines of pink and blue. In lemon juice; this archive
of unprovenanced vows, misheard names, missed cues. Some day
she may rip out the pages, lay
them flat, heat up the iron. For now,
invisible; the lover picking out her name on snow so white,
it looked like truth; unbending wedding lilies, pearls for sorrow,
tangled lace. She leaves space for days and dates; mislaid,
or folded small, in drawers
of long sold, white-lined boxes.
Blue
Some women swore by razor blades,
hoarded in sweet tins and cups. Hovered
over husbands shaving in small mirrors,
terrified they would discard the blunt.
Others were faithful to nails and hinges;
on Sunday walks scouring shorn ground
for treasure. A discarded bolt a triumph.
Those were the days our mothers took
up hems, stretched mince. But never
gave in to soil. Every year the sowing
of rusty metal. The keeping of hydrangeas
impossibly blue.
Genesis
This was a house of piano keys.
The clocks kept fairy tale time,
dinner was a guess, no one wore
pockets. I wove a nest of straw,
placed inside it a brother’s curl
(which one?), buttons from a midden,
scraps of paper where I wrote
my name in ash, charcoal, blood.
My new husband said leave it,
it’s worthless. Why buttons,
here’s beads, that’s not your name
anymore; a house of straw will
always blow down. But I hoarded
the treasure; stored it in a crevice
I carved into a Bible, hid it
in the attic against judgement day.
Counting House
When you deal in copper your
fingers smell of blood, the smell
of poverty. A stack of copper
never makes silver. Even when
you add the unpicked stitches
of an unnecessary lace collar,
the columns let in tears and topple.
The master of the counting house
can make the figures come out,
balance we call this. He hunts
all morning for an odd shilling,
dogged we call this, a small dog
waiting by a rat hole with the
patience a cat would never display,
and there it is, the stray shilling,
disfigured by a careless clerk.
He washes his inky hands, watches
the water swirling purple, indigo,
clear; goes off to lunch, in his
pocket, sixpence for the serving girl
in her cheap collar and stained cuffs.
ISBN: 978-1-915877-00-0 | Pages: 72 pages / Hardback | Year published: 2024
Four Thousand Keys, Linda McKenna’s second full-length poetry collection, explores themes of dispossession, dislocation and life on the margins between history and story. Combining archival sources, myth, family stories, ekphrasis and the voices of people from the past, the poems deal with the pull of ancestry and its emotional hinterlands, motherhood and ageing, exile and rootlessness, interspersed with moments of acceptance and hope for the future.
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Doire is the Irish word for oak grove, translating into English as Derry.
