Lachlan Mackinnon
Lachlan Mackinnon | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1956 Aberdeen, Scotland |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Christ Church, Oxford |
| Notable awards | Eric Gregory Award 1986 |
| Spouse | Wendy Cope |
Lachlan Mackinnon (born 1956) is a contemporary Scottish poet, critic and literary journalist. He was born in Aberdeen and educated at Charterhouse and Oxford. He recently took early retirement from his job as a teacher of English at Winchester College and moved to Ely with his partner, the poet Wendy Cope. His output to date comprises three collections of poetry, two critical studies and a biography. He also reviews regularly for, among others, The Times Literary Supplement.
Style of Poetry
Mackinnon's poetry is modest, meditative, without hyperbole or rhetoric. Critics have identified the influence of the American poet Robert Lowell in Mackinnon's first two collections, Monterey Cypress and The Coast of Bohemia, published within three years of one another. his third collection, The Jupiter Collisions, is threaded together by two sequence-poems and provides retrospective contemplation of the author's childhood and adolescence, both in personal details and in the context of the 'Sixties (rock music, space travel, Minimalist art). The collection also affords a small number of poems in sonnet form, despite the poet's tendency towards vers-libre, thereby combining the legacy of Lowell with that of Auden. In 2010 he published Small Hours with Faber.He will also be partaking in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six where he has written a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible[1]
Bibliography
- (1983) Eliot, Auden, Lowell: Aspects of the Baudelairean Inheritance (Macmillan)
- (1988) Monterey Cypress (Chatto & Windus)
- (1988) Shakespeare the Aesthete: An Exploration of Literary Theory (Palgrave)
- (1991) The Coast of Bohemia (Chatto & Windus)
- (1992) The Lives of Elsa Triolet (Chatto & Windus)
- (1998) New Writing 7: An Anthology (Vintage) [in association with the British Council]
- (2003) The Jupiter Collisions (Faber and Faber)
- (2010) Small Hours (Faber and Faber)
- (2011) Sixty Six (short piece) for the Bush Theatre[2]