Bøker av Lachlan Mackinnon

A master of elegy and eulogy who finds during lockdown the space to take stock. Many of the poems in The Missing Months occupy the strange hiatus afforded by lockdown. They look forward as well as back, toying with possible futures, enthused by utopian dreams or fearing cultural and bodily entropy. They celebrate and mourn the lives of friends and relatives, captivated by carefully tended images from the past. Lockdown's 'missing months' in the world of a four-year-old granddaughter are laid down and remembered for her. Familiar objects - a park bench, stones, grass, stars, windows - are reanimated. This poetry of imaginative journeying 'stretches/Banks on a slope of air and turns' like the heron it watches. Between the crackle of radio signals and rain, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the American singer Miranda Lambert, here is a poet in search of points of reference, the 'bright fresh leaves' of sunlight among the ruins.

Personal accounts are at the heart of Closing Sysco, where each story reveals the cultural, political, and historical ramifications of industrial closure in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the former steel city of Atlantic Canada.

A book about refugees, reality television, detective shows, number-theory, Shakespeare's brothers, ecology, and a marriage.

"Monterey Cypress" and "The Coast of Bohemia" announced Mackinnon as a poet of cool evocation, writing of exile and belonging and breakdown. This collection is Mackinnon's first since 1991.

Lachlan MacKinnon's fourth collection opens with a gathering of lyrics and descriptive poems: observing rites of passage (elegies, wedding poems), offering nuanced accounts of places and their patchwork afterlives (the Midlands, a Suffolk sketchbook), or meditations on historical figures introspectively at odds with their time (King Canute, Edward Thomas). This preoccupation with contingency - personal and historical - opens onto The Book of Emma: a long poem of fifty-four sections, written mostly in prose, which address a lost friend and contemporary in terms which seem laconically factual, but which draw their power from archaic conventions (Egyptian, Celtic) of talking to the dead.

Acknowledgements - Introduction - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Conclusion - Notes - Works Cited - Index