Signed Poetry Books - Lachlan Mackinnon

(scanned image of the signature to follow)

One job I had to do returning from Poetry Live for Haiti last week was seek out more poems by Lachlan Mackinnon and I found this on Amazon new and used for the very minimum price. So, bless my cotton socks when it arrived but it has a signature on the title page - not advertised as signed but would it occur to anyone to forge a Mackinnon autograph.

And it's a likeable book, too, even occasionally providing that rare thing, a poem that one wouldn't have minded writing something a bit like.

Like the Sonnet that ends,

Falling in love's a paradox like this.

Either it happens like a thunderbolt,

So when it makes our lives make sense, it lies,

Or we had long been hoping for the kiss

That changed us, and aware how it could jolt

Our beings, we could suffer no surprise.

It is, in its best places, a quiet, appreciative little book, betraying the dramatic implications of its title. But gentleness and thought can have just as big implications as big bangs.

However, what struck me as much as anything about the volume was the dreadfulness of the blurb, the terrible critical language that is meant to imply such deep readings but actually says almost nothing. It says,

'The Jupiter Collisions' includes two subtle and intriguingly constructed sequences of linked poems, in which the canvas of personal matter (love, loss, contingency) is stretched across a frame of phiolosophical concerns in a poetry which is as unafraid of thinking - 'the heaven of ideas'- as it is firmly vested in 'the pointillisme of what is'.

Well, I never. If I'd seen that first, I'm sure it would have put me off buying the book in the first place. So there is certainly such a thing as bad blurb which persuades one not to buy a book one would have liked.

It is to be hoped that Mackinnon's books on Shakespeare and C20th poetry's Baudelairean inheritance are inexpensively available and equally rewarding and perhaps one day here I'll be able to confirm that they are.