Margaret Mackinnon
Poet and Teacher
Now Available:
Winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize
“In AFTERNOON IN CARTAGO, Margaret Mackinnon reminds us why we turn to art in our hours of darkness. In an often too-loud world, these elegant ekphrastic poems offer their reader a hushed and haunting refuge, one in which both time and each life unfolding within it feel as diaphanous and changeable as light. From her compassionate and capacious contemplation of the lives and works of others, Mackinnon has fashioned a remarkable portrait of our collective humanity. While these poems do not turn away from deep grief and atrocity, this is a collection in which the spirit is ultimately made to rise, to recollect that there may yet be an unimagined possibility, an open window, an open door. These poems are a necessary and timely celebration of the small and transitory moments that, in the end, sustain and define us.”—Kathleen Graber, author of Correspondence
“Whether contemplating the death of a parent, imagining events from the life of someone as obscure as Juana Pereira to one as celebrated as Bonnie Prince Charlie, or turning her keen lyric sense to the beauty of the natural world, Margaret Mackinnon transforms both the remarkable and the quotidian into art. Nowhere does the poet shine brighter than in her ekphrastic and historically-based poems where she takes Dickinson’s charge to “tell all the truth but tell it slant” to surprising places, reminding us again and again… “If this were only fact, who would need it?” and “It’s not just the old stories— / but what we make of them.” What Mackinnon makes is exquisite, astute, and…magical. Her words cast a spell so mesmerizing you’ll hope never to have it broken.” - Frank Pain0, author of Obscura, Out of Eden, and The Rapture of Matter
“Once in a while, if you are lucky, you read the work of a poet that reveals what you did not know had been obscured, the work of a mystic, and you are the richer for it. As with this collection. Here the poet’s eye is piercing, mysterious and observant in ways that make darkness dazzle and brightness seeable. These are poems of memory and layer, of history and image and echo, carried as if by current through landscapes of light and shadow, life and death, dream and fact. These poems are nothing less than whole geographies of inner living. With their elastic beauty, their design, their attention to the sublime and splendid as well as the ripe and ruined, this is a collection that seeks to make whole the mind’s fragments and figments and to give the absent and unknowable not only a language but a voice with which to speak it. Margaret Mackinnon’s precision, intensity and patience--quiet as the owl’s—remind me, line by line, that to live on earth is to live in awe. Listen, watch: we live in these poems.” - Allison Seay, author of To See the Queen, winner of the Lexi Rudinitsky Poetry Award
In the stunning poems in AFTERNOON IN CARTAGO, Margaret Mackinnon has assembled a tapestry with an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, including places as diverse as Argentina, the Scottish Highlands, and Myrtle Beach – ekphrastic poems on artists from Van Gogh and Bosch to Frieda Kahlo and Fairfield Porter – and poems based on folkloric and Biblical stories. ‘Not just the old stories -- / but what we make of them,’ Mackinnon writes and her intelligent, generous observations make her a most trustworthy reporter. Poised between the real and the imagined, these poems occupy a liminal space in which objects and people and places can connect and disengage within ‘the half-shadows/imagination brings.’ I am thrilled to have found this book and delighted to introduce it to new lucky readers.” Maggie Anderson, 2021 Judge of the Snyder Prize
