Small Hours

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.

Lachlan Mackinnon lives in Ely. He is the author of five collections of poems including Small Hours, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2010, and works of criticism and biography. He writes academically in English and French about Shakespeare and modern English and French literature. He is a regular reviewer for the national press, and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2011.