Jill Maclean

Brevity of Red, the Jill Maclean

Before she turned 40, Jill MacLean had lost three of the most important women in her life: her mother and sister to illness, and her seventeen-year-old daughter to a car accident. One of the lasting legacies of the grief caused by these losses has been the idea that it is impossible and undesirable to live every waking moment in the knowledge that death can strike at any time. While this knowledge informs Jill?s work, her intelligent, vivid, carefully crafted poems go beyond; they honour the dead, yet they avoid easy answers. Jill's language is focused, her descriptions clear and precise. Though the mood is largely elegiac, it is also wry and surprisingly edgy, as it reaches for the grace notes of celebration.

With fresh metaphors and emotionally resonant images, Jill questions those places where we seek solace: our artistic imaginations, our religious traditions and myths, as well as the entrancing, but arbitrarily cruel natural world from which we spring. She seeks a clear-eyed view of its beauty, intricacy and waste, and of the vulnerable lives of its inhabitants.