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WHEN I SAW JIMI
Julie Maclean was born in Bristol, UK, and is now based on the Surf Coast, Australia. She spends part of every year in the UK visiting friends and family.
Inspired by the Goons she wrote her first nonsense poem aged 5 and won her first poetry prize aged 9 for reciting GM Hopkins’ Spring.
A former teacher of English, Dance and Drama in secondary schools and colleges, she has also prepared refugees and new arrivals for mainstream study and has taught Literacy and Numeracy through art and music.
As a student in the sixties and early seventies she picked fruit, made L plates in a factory, pulled beer, fitted Clark’s shoes, cleaned toilets and survived as a cocktail waitress at Butlins.
With her son now at Uni, she can focus on poetry and short fiction when she’s not writing love stories for couples marrying along the Great Ocean Road or engaged in university study.
As a finalist in the Whitmore Press Prize in 2010 she performed in the Poetry Idol Final in Melbourne in front of Les Murray.
In 2013 a radio play in which Plath and Hughes reunite on the Queen Mary 2 and which was given a special mention by Bristol Theatre Review as ‘intriguing’, was produced by Pulse Radio, Victoria (Aus).
She is working on her second full collection of poetry, a chapbook and a collection of short fiction.
When I saw Jimi
Julie Maclean
ISBN 978-1-909357-24-2
Publication 8th June 2013
Poetry
216 x 138 mm
68 pages
£7.99 + P&P UK and Europe
ORDER HERE
Losing it to Hendrix
When Moog was in vogue
soft pop beginnings of cool
I wore a pink Lennon cap
and caught the number 8
bus to see Jimi at the Bristol
Colston Hall
When he dropped to his knees making
rough love to the white
Flying V with the psychedelic motif
I screamed
then swooned when he bent it
from behind
Golden Boy
We used to walk to school
together fast a shock of blonde
you’d sweep across your face
Yapped of Jagger, Cohen
school caps, bikes,
exams
These days on Friends
you’re grey and bald,
fitted for new teeth, a by pass
Now we compare the colour
of the faces of dead fathers
yours black, mine yellow
Your mother crawled the floor
banged her head against a chair
Mine crawled the walls
Your dad never smacked
Mine smacked me once
Mothers all the time
Knocking sense into us
And out
Glacial Karma
Jumping out under
the blade-slap
whop-whop rotors
of the helicopter
you did the blackest
diamond run
clicking tips Rossignol red
carving ghost tracks
into the soft face of Franz Josef
In the cafe we kept
our beanies on
cloud-breath evaporated,
slicks formed from boot-drip
on the timber floor
in the air hot chips
I drank chocolate
melting to marshmallow
at the thought of you
taunting that giant
On the bus back down
the wind screamed up
windows splintered
under hundred mile an hour spleen
bus heaving its warning
plates shifting in glacial memoir
or was it humour?
Later, at Happy Hour
we drank Bourbon
Ice clinking its thawing ways
against the sides of thick glass
‘Julie Maclean, one of the major new talents shortlisted for the prestigious international Crashaw Prize in 2012 ‘… writers we believe have produced superb first collections of poetry.’
Chris Hamilton-Emery
(Salt, UK)
‘Voted a winner in the Orbis 159 Readers’ Award, attracted comments about the ‘wonderful use of language’; ‘brilliant… writing. Succinct (with) memorable images…beautifully structured…irresistible. A remarkable collection which conjures up England in the 60’s in such vivid detail with its stories and descriptions that yes, you really will remember being there - or long to go back. And if those of a younger generation wish they had experienced that period, here’s the ideal opportunity.‘
Carole Baldock
(Editor, Orbis and Kudos)
‘These poems have an appreciable crispness, surprise, intensity and clarity. Maclean has broken through to that rare space – call it a maturity of perception, a keen sense of image – that most poets never get to. This is strong and enlivening work.’
David Brooks
(Southerly, Australia)
‘This is poetry that you won’t want to stop reading. Its attractions are manifold: the milieu of the swinging sixties; love affairs that are by turns erotic, comic, tender and violent; unsentimental and powerful elegies; and an urgent attention to the surprising and plangent condition of our lives.'
Maria Takolander
(writer, literary critic)
Best Friends
Like twins fixed in Sixties fantasy
we held hands with John and Paul
and practised kissing on our
arms and sang ‘Downtown’ on
Top of the Pops
She had cats in a messy house,
her own TV, Fab magazine, a mum who
didn’t look in her bag or check her Maths
or smell her breath for Woodbine smoked in
the sheds. Linda was the good girl; loved, trusted
But I got the boys
On the way home from school one night,
in young dumb rage about God knows what,
I hit her over the head with my umbrella,
to smash her down, feel the edge
Fat Bag Placid Cow Dreary Bitch
Years on in different hemispheres,
headlines on a double-page spread,
Hardy tragedy in tabloid attitude
Woman Dies in Childbirth
Hard news Brilliantly upstaged
And in quieter times now,
I imagine what sort of mother
she might have made,
like her own,
kind and there,
peaceful at home,
satisfied.
But as a coward,
traitor; sharp, hard,
guilty in my exile,
I could never be the same
Driving down to Lyme
dingy post-war homes pebble-dash
the dream of being the woman
out on the Cobb waiting,
waiting for him to come home
The museum shrinks, it’s half term
Keen mums furnishing maps, pens,
raincoats buttoned to the neck
getting in the way
In groups we go on tour to hunt
icthyosaur skulking in the cliff
We are Mary Anning stumbling across
eons Victorian men who would be kings
Half-moon ammonite, crenellate,
soft grey That is my prize
Two million years in the pocket
An outlet pours curious jetsam onto
this black strand Green glass
for smoothing, small windows
spanning one hundred years
Delicate willow pattern
survives Seventies ceramic
emerald catches the eye
In the background small boys
hack hack hack at stone
hoping for the jawbone
some fabulous find
Baby can’t
don’t ask me to suck, lick
you just want to choke,
break me
if you force it
my skin won’t hold
then you’ll see
nothing inside except babies, tiny dead babies,
all mine
this baby wants the warm nuzzle dripping milk
not your bitter shot cold gluck
poking fun at my
empty space
WINNER OF THE GEOFF STEVENS MEMORIAL POETRY AWARD 2012
Blood and Bone
You feed the garden now
Remember that day
our first bird camouflaged
in the dusty feathers of the
Cootamundra
Pinky cap nodding
Seeds appearing for the first time
You fed bacon scraps to the maggies
Scaly fingers
clawed in the shadow
of the hammer’s grip
Hands, by the way, I love
Planting stakes in the west
Grosse Lisse were Aquarian children
Laterals were dreadlocks
You would not tame them
Murder you said
Three springs ago it was a moonscape
then grasses nosed through
Lines of purpling beetroot
Slicks of onion Squatting mignon
I love to watch you work
The way you kneel,
gathering everything
into the core of you
Intense Silver-quick
One eye always on the clock
Your back is stiffening
There’s harvest in the making
It wasn’t always this way
Greek Theatre over Baghdad
Achillean boys
in fresh overalls
tuck photos
into secret folds
of survival vests
like they’ve seen
in a Hollywood movie
then sortie
to face
the night-borne shadow
of a high priority
peace-time
exercise
On designated cue
Black Hawks
wokka wokka,
hovering five in line
peering through
the myopic green
of the night lens
sniffing out
the enemy’s sweat
Blades quarrel
mid-air
unnerving
wavering birds
spinning out
of rehearsal
into another show
