Small Hours

by Lachlan MacKinnon

Lachlan MacKinnon's fourth collection opens with a gathering of lyrics and descriptive 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.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

Reviews

[Joe Stickley]

So much love and pain packed into Lachlan Mackinnon’s work. He wholeheartedly is deserving of more praise and attention. Beautiful poetry and prose.