JULIE MACLEAN | Eye


'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’.