Many of the poems in my second collection, Four Thousand Keys, were inspired by the story of Elizabeth Dunham, who in August 1819, was charged at the Old Bailey of the theft of the keys of the Bank of England. Elizabeth had not stolen the keys to effect a break in of the vaults and make away with coins, bank notes or gold or to pass the keys to a gang of thieves but as part of a compulsion she had been exhibiting to possess herself of the keys to a wide range of public buildings in London and its environs. When followed to her lodgings in the ironically named Hope Alley, the porter of the bank claimed to have found, in baskets, boxes and under her bed, four thousand keys, all but 200 labelled and dated showing where she had stolen them from. This bizarre case caught the imagination of journalists and chroniclers. Elizabeth was found guilty but non compos mentis and sent to Bethlem Hospital where she died a couple of years later. Her records say good bodily health and no insanity apart from on the topic of keys. I was fascinated with this story (detailed in the records of the Old Bailey) and the image of this respectably dressed middle aged mother of at least one grown up child embarking on this faintly macabre pilgrimage through the streets of London stealing the means of access to great and powerful institutions without ever accessing them in any meaningful way. When I began thinking about this collection, I had planned to write poems ‘about’ the institutions (Bank, Parliament, Greenwich Observatory, the Founding Hospital, the Royal College of Physicians etc) and their wider contexts. But instead the figure of Elizabeth and what she was saying to me (a middle-aged mother of a grown up child with little impact on the world around me and powerlessness to change or improve society) began to haunt me. Her fruitless crime spree / pilgrimage seemed to me to symbolise both women’s place in society in the past and speak to me of my feelings about my place in the world.Many of my poems start with a response to an object. I think that comes from the fact that I worked in a museum for a long time. The emotional resonance of objects as well as their material and tactile ‘selves’ are at the heart of many of my poems, including those in issue 14 of The Lonely Crowd. ‘Self-Portrait in Silk’ imagines Elizabeth, dressed in shattering silk that perhaps mirrors her shattering sense of self and grip on reality. Because in the past silk was sold by the weight rather than by the length, shattered silk garments are a common challenge for textile collections in museums. In order to add weight and lustre to the silk, metallic salts were added to the silk making process. In the nineteenth century the fashion for ‘rustling’ silk and silk taffeta, combined with the bright colours in vogue, all added a fatal damage to silk causing it to split and shatter. Eventually shattered silk will disintegrate, floating away in dust. In this poem which I rewrote many many times, I always knew I wanted to end with

‘…the weft

disappears first, the warp, always

stronger holds its own for longer’

partly because that’s true, the longer and stronger warp threads outlast the shorter weft threads, but also because of the double meaning in warp or warped and to reflect what textile conservators refer to as the ‘weird beauty’ created by the ribbon effect of shattered silk while thinking about Elizabeth’s weirdly creative endeavour to have some means of access to the institutions she was surrounded by but which afforded her no care or comfort. I played with the structure of the poem too, writing it in couplets, short verses before settling on a fractured sonnet, retaining the 14 lines with a half rhyme at the end as that seemed to suit the shatter in both the silk and the narrative voice.

While writing this collection, the war in Ukraine started and of course as I write now there are more wars happening. War was a constant for women in the past who regularly sent their sons off to places they had never heard off with meagre comforts. I had seen in an auction catalogue an image of a nineteenth-century ‘campaign’ box, a writing box designed to be portable enough to take to war. The symbol of ‘winged victory’ was commonly used in campaign boxes. Baize and tooled leather were features in men’s writing boxes, whereas velvet was more commonly used in women’s. This box, along with Elizabeth’s keys, was the inspiration for ‘My Son, At War’. Researching the history of locks and keys to provide myself with a context for the sorts of keys Elizabeth would have stolen was fascinating. I learned that the top of a key is called the bow and that the different shape of the bows include curled, crown, kidney and heart. I felt that ending on these words would provide a reminder that death and injury in war involves real bodies and organs, a brutal contrast to the symbol of winged victory.

‘Trompe l’Oeil’ also starts with an old object, in this case a piece of embroidery that will be framed to make a fire screen. I have one like this a peacock on silk that screens the fireplace in my sitting room. The one in the attic that I keep meaning to ‘do something with’ has a piece of tapestry featuring a huntsman in a red coat. I love the combination of skills in fire screens; woodwork, glazing, sewing and the way they show us what can be achieved with left-overs, remnants, scraps. I wanted to create something that paid tribute to that and that echoed how I think poetry often functions, taking fragments and cast offs to create something that covers and comforts a gaping open hearth and heart.

Linda McKenna’s debut poetry collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, was published by Doire Press in 2020. The title poem won the An Post/Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year in 2020. In 2018 she won the Seamus Heaney Award for Poetry and the Red Line Festival Award. She has had poems published or forthcoming in, among others, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The North, The Honest Ulsterman, Crannóg, Acumen, Atrium, One, The Stony Thursday Book, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Abridged, Skylight 47, The High Window, Raceme, The Poetry Bus. Her latest collection, also from Doire, is Four Thousand Keys. From North County Dublin, she lives in Downpatrick, Co Down.