'Eye' | ISBN 978 1 763653 085 | 102 pgs | September 2024
ANNE ELVEY
Eye is a work of careful observation deftly told through sharp imagery.
Maclean’s poems inhabit a slippage between Earth and self, where an
Earth-self imaginary develops in the fractures of relationship. Alert to
the violences of colonisation and guided by Maclean’s intelligent use
of language, Eye is both unsettling and compelling.
MARIA TAKOLANDER
Julie Maclean focuses her gaze on the grandeur and minutiae of a new
country, the diversity and eccentricities of the modern world. Hers is
a mission of ‘loving everything equally’: baby echidnas, 3D printers,
anime, kangaroo paws. Maclean renders it all vivaciously, even as she
mourns the unspeakable tragedy of climate change.
JOHN BARTLETT
With a binocular eye the poems in Eye notice everything, from the
smallest snail to the dangerous territory of relationships. Here poet
Julie Maclean assumes the role of both outsider/insider, a kind of
mystic sage of rich and luscious language. These are Blake-like, poems
that “see a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”
JO LANGDON
Alert and attentive, Julie Maclean’s Eye is quick yet focused in its
gaze, forming worlds anew and closely felt. These poems hold scenes
of ‘melon light’, with ‘two dolphins / one for each eye’, ‘bumblebees
the size of fairy wrens’, and birds ‘growling ... like dogs’. Traversing
landscapes inviting and violent—haunted by colonial violence—
Maclean’s language is colloquial and eloquent, nimble and expansive.
With ‘eyes everywhere’, her poems show how what is troubling or
dangerous can be rendered ‘So easy through the lens’.