Lachlan MacKinnon - Small Hours

Lachlan MacKinnon, Small Hours (Faber)

Wendy Cope has a well known poem about men being like buses. You wait ages for one then three turn up at once. Well, it would appear that the one she chose to get on was Lachlan MacKinnon because for those who didn't know, like I didn't until recently, they are now married.

Mackinnon is a fine, quiet and thoughtful poet. Much of this latest book is taken up with elegies for friends, and most of it, in fact, by The Book of Emma, an extended biographical work mostly in prose in memory of a friend, Emma Smith, who was a contemporary at Oxford. I'm not sure if that makes it a prose poem and would rather not know. Anybody who knows what a prose poem is probably has too much time on their hands. But like the poems, it is economically written, in short sentences but builds into both a fragmentary personal memoir, shifting in time, and a devoted tribute.

Emma wasn't a girlfriend as such but greatly admired in a way that perhaps goes beyond such a relationship. What MacKinnon can do, and does elsewhere, is suggest something beyond the words that the words are inadequate to say, which is hopefully what the very best poetry aspires to do but most poetry fails in.

A similar idea comes at the end of In Memory of Keith Darvill,

Oh, the silences

men keep between them

when what they are keeping back

is what would spoil in being said.

He moves easily between poems in rhyme and metre and free verse forms, as again is something that the finest modern poets are able to do so that neither option completely defines him although perhaps the free verse here is marginally preferable. So, having said that, we will forgive him A Suffolk Sketchbook which looks suspiciously as if it is written in haiku and thus, for a poet in English, usually punishable by a stint of community service.

Midlands meditates upon history in unregarded places and how they are now in a melancholy, Larkinesque view of England,

I thought of close skies

darkened to monochrome,

of rain teeming

in streets of little market-towns

that turned to manufacturing.

Small Hours, on the slightly dubious ground of looking like a poem about poetry, defines it more memorably than most in,

all you want is a few words

that will say how it was for us

at one a.m. on a Wednesday morning

so clearly that a thousand years may hear.

Canute is a fine poem, as is Edward Thomas. Two touchstones of modesty and humanity that serve any poet as fine models. MacKinnon is aware of the vastness beyond, the unsayable size of his philosophical concerns and it is interesting in The Book of Emma that he declares a religious faith while admitting that true atheism is 'as tough a faith as any'. And, elsewhere reflects,

But a western mind reels at the thought of a world in which the existence of God is not even a question because nothing exists and only nothing. Few atheists deny their own being.

The Book of Emma will be worth returning to again and again. It makes the thought of prizes seem a little tawdry but if Small Hours doesn't feature on all the shortlists and take a generous share of this year's awards then something will have been seriously amiss.