Lachlan Mackinnon (b. 1956) is a contemporary English poet, critic and literary journalist. He was born in Aberdeen and educated at Charterhouse and Oxford. He lives in Winchester with the poet Wendy Cope, and teaches English at Winchester College. 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. Charterhouse School is a British public school, located in Godalming in the county of Surrey. ... The University of Oxford (often called Oxford University), located in the city of Oxford, England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... Wendy Cope (born July 21, 1945) is a contemporary British poet. ... Winchester College is a public school in the city of Winchester in Hampshire, in the south of England. ... The Times Literary Supplement (or TLS) is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation. ...

Mackinnon poetry is modest; it is 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 latest 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, thus combining the legacy of Lowell with that of Auden. Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917–September 12, 1977), born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr. ... Free verse (also at times referred to as vers libre) is a term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are recognizable as poetry by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be... Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1939 Wystan Hugh Auden (February 21, 1907–September 29, 1973) was an English poet. ...

Bibliography

• Eliot, Auden, Lowell: Aspects of the Baudelairean Inheritance (Macmillan), 1983
• Monterey Cypress (Chatto & Windus), 1988
• Shakespeare the Aesthete: An Exploration of Literary Theory (Palgrave), 1988
• The Coast of Bohemia (Chatto & Windus), 1991
• The Lives of Elsa Triolet (Chatto & Windus), 1992
• The Jupiter Collisions (Faber and Faber), 2003