Mackinnon's first two collections were Monterey Cypress(1998) and The Coast of Bohemia (1991).His third, The Jupiter Collisions (2003), contains among others two sequence-poems, one reflecting on the "restoration of all things" promised in the Bible.
The author's childhood and adolescence, both in personal details and in the context of the 'Sixties (rock music, space travel, Minimalist art), prime numbers and a self-translating Anglo-French sonnet also appear.
He also contributed to the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six Books, for which he wrote a short play based on the Acts of the Apostles in the King James Bible[1] Doves (2017) contains poems about poets, popular music, maths,television, Shakespeare's brothers, drugs and language, among other subjects; the title-poem is an elegy for Seamus Heaney.
The Missing Months (2022) has at its centre "Lockdown", a sequence about Covid experience which moves in its references between Homer, Osip Mandelstam and the American singer Miranda Lambert.
The Lives of Elsa Triolet (1992) recounts the life and worlds of the Russian-born novelist, the first woman to win the Prix Goncourt, the sister of Vladimir Mayakovsky's mistress Lili Brik and the wife of the French poet Louis Aragon.