Lachlan Mackinnon

Last updated

Lachlan Mackinnon
Born1956
Aberdeen, Scotland
OccupationPoet
Nationality British
Alma mater Christ Church, Oxford
Notable awards Eric Gregory Award
1986
Spouse Wendy Cope

Lachlan Mackinnon (born 1956) is a contemporary British poet, critic and literary journalist. Born in Aberdeen, he was raised in England and the United States. He was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. He took early retirement from teaching English at Winchester College in 2011 and moved to Ely with his wife, the poet Wendy Cope.

Contents

Poetry


Mackinnon's first two collections were Monterey Cypress(1998) and The Coast of Bohemia (1991).His third , The Jupiter Collisions (2003), contains among others two sequence-poems, one reflecting on the "restoration of all things" promised in the Bible. The author's childhood and adolescence, both in personal details and in the context of the 'Sixties (rock music, space travel, Minimalist art), prime numbers and a self-translating Anglo-French sonnet also appear.

His fourth collection, Small Hours, (2010) opens with the dramatic "Pigeons" and the comic "Canute". Elegy, wedding celebrations for friends and a rendering of Sappho confirm his increasing range, while the second half of the book is a long poem, "The Book of Emma", largely written in prose, commemorating a friend from university days but covering both memory and much that has happened since. Small Hours was short-listed for the 2010 Forward Prize. He received a Gregory Award in 1986 and in 2011 a Cholmondeley Award.

He also contributed to the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six Books , for which he wrote a short play based on the Acts of the Apostles in the King James Bible [1]

Doves (2017) contains poems about poets, popular music, maths,television, Shakespeare's brothers, drugs and language, among other subjects; the title-poem is an elegy for Seamus Heaney. The Missing Months (2022) has at its centre "Lockdown", a sequence about Covid experience which moves in its references between Homer, Osip Mandelstam and the American singer Miranda Lambert. Other poems explore a fear of cultural decline and a celebration of friendship and much else from the poet's consistently extending material. The development of his poetry to date is both formal and linguistic, as his diction becomes tougher, his forms more bare.

Prose

Mackinnon's Eliot, Auden, Lowell (1983) explores how Charles Baudelaire's model of the poet as dandy became a performative model for later poets. The book is unstatedly structuralist in approach. In Shakespeare the Aesthete(1988) Shakespeare's work is read in relation to wider literary concerns, including ideas of symbolism and allegory. It includes a tacitly deconstructionist account of The Winter's Tale.

The Lives of Elsa Triolet (992) recounts the life and worlds of the Russian-born novelist, the first woman to win the Prix Goncourt, the sister of Vladimir Mayakovsky's mistress Lili Brik and the wife of the French poet Louis Aragon. Mackinnon has also written academic conference papers in English and in French, on two occasions for the Société Française Shakespeare (in "Cahiers Elizabéthains", 1994 and 2017). He contributed an essay on Susanna Hall to The Shakespeare Circle, eds. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, and to Shakespeare's Creative Legacies (2016), eds Paul Edmondson and Peter Holbrook as well as to other volumes.

He has reviewed poetry, fiction,literary criticism and biography, dramatic productions, art history and American political history for many newspapers and magazines, most regularly for The Independent and The Times Literary Supplement.



Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T. S. Eliot</span> US-born British poet (1888–1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. Through his trials in language, writing style, and verse structure, he reinvigorated English poetry. He also dismantled outdated beliefs and established new ones through a collection of critical essays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">W. H. Auden</span> British-American poet (1907–1973)

Wystan Hugh Auden was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Motion</span> English poet and writer (born 1952)

Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.

Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis MacNeice</span> Irish poet and playwright (1907–1963)

Frederick Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright, and a member of the Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots.

Vincent Thomas Buckley was an Australian poet, teacher, editor, essayist and critic.

The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize that was, for many years, awarded by the Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.

Peter McDonald is a poet, university lecturer, and writer of literary criticism. He holds the post of Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford.

John Haffenden is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Sheffield.

Laurence Lerner, often called Larry, was a South African-born British literary critic, poet, novelist, and lecturer, recognized for his achievement with his election to The Royal Society of Literature.

Fred D'Aguiar is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright of Portuguese descent. He is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Bernard O'Donoghue FRSL is a contemporary Irish poet and academic.

<i>Poems</i> (Auden)

Poems is the title of three separate collections of the early poetry of W. H. Auden. Auden refused to title his early work because he wanted the reader to confront the poetry itself. Consequently, his first book was called simply Poems when it was printed by his friend and fellow poet Stephen Spender in 1928; he used the same title for the very different book published by Faber and Faber in 1930, and by Random House in 1934, which also included The Orators and The Dance of Death.

John Davy Hayward CBE was an English editor, critic, anthologist and bibliophile.

"The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest" is a long poem by W.H. Auden, written 1942–44, and first published in 1944. Auden regarded the work as “my Ars Poetica, in the same way I believe The Tempest to have been Shakespeare’s.”

John Fuller FRSL is an English poet and author, and Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Robert Crawford is a Scottish poet, scholar and critic. He is currently Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.

Roy McFadden was a Northern Irish poet, editor, and lawyer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T. S. Eliot bibliography</span>

The T. S. Eliot bibliography contains a list of works by T. S. Eliot.

John Clive Hall was an English poet and editor.

References

  1. 1 2 "Bush Theatre". Archived from the original on 4 July 2011. Retrieved 29 September 2012.