Literary witness to the catastrophes of war

Joy Hendry
Tuesday September 2, 2003
The Guardian

Colin Mackay, who has committed suicide aged 52, two days after completing his autobiography, Jacob's Ladder, dismissed himself as a poet, and I'm sure destroyed many poems before he died; if you accused him of being one, there was an instant, and not always civil, recoil. But many wonderful poems of his survive, and the two sequences he composed, Red Ice (1987) and Cold Night Lullaby (1998) are outstanding.