Eye is a love letter/memoir dedicated to a life in Oz, from a dreary, strike and blackout-riven UK to an angry but lively post-Whitlam autopsy in a progressive school in South Gippsland in 1976.

It’s in four parts each referencing photographic terms to support the idea of how a place looks from an outsider’s perspective. Some poems chronicle travels to the outback, Tasmania and Far North Queensland, observing the natural world and our place in it. Some pay tribute to personalities and artists who’ve inspired over the years and others make observations on political and personal events, with the book’s main themes being transience, loss and mortality.

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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.
Maria Takolander

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.”
John Bartlett

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’.
Jo Langdon