The Jupiter Collisions

by Lachlan MacKinnon

The Jupiter Collisions, Lachlan Mackinnon's third collection, opens with a characteristically exact account of something a distant episode in cosmology. This is the starting point for a series of investigations into uncertainty and flux, in which poem after poem brings home its cargo in precisely shaped but oblique and surprising ways. The collection is as various in its concerns as it is unified in its search for the close naming of things. One of the paradoxes of these poems is to start from spareness and reserve, and to end by establishing an intensely personal voice, whatever the subject almost casually to hand - American scenes, foreign places, the remembered present of the 1960s, the lives within paintings, the potentiality of prime numbers.The Jupiter Collisions includes two subtle and intriguingly constructed sequences of linked poems, in which the canvas of personal matter (loss, love, contingency) is stretched across a frame of philosophical 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'. We come to recognise a tone, quietly distinctive, addressing the world in poems which are cool but numinous in their phrasing, moving in their understatement.

Genres: Poetry

53 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the distanced, indulgently opaque THE COAST OF BOHEMIA, Mackinnon strikes a balance between a deeply private practice of reverie and giving the results of that practice a form that lets us share in what is universal and resonant. Also, his flair for memorials to the dead and to the past is now in full evidence, a dialogue with time, memory and a kind of vision of survival via the divine, made explicit, or as explicit as Mackinnon makes anything, in the final poem.