Jennifer Maiden

Jennifer Maiden Poems

Jennifer Maiden Biography

Jennifer Maiden has been one of the most striking voices to emerge from a generation that included John Forbes, Martin Johnston, Robert Adamson and Michael Dransfield, as well as Joanne Burns, Pam Brown and Vicki Viidikas. In an era when the privileging of masculinity was starting to be called just that, women poets embodied in their work the changing roles of women. The questioning critical voice in Jennifer Maiden's first book Tactics (1974) is obsessive yet self-deprecating. Her elegant, assured language loudly signals a new talent, and her prolific and constantly varying output since then has shown this talent to be honed and always developing, often in unexpected directions – including prose fiction. In Mines (1999), her thirteenth volume of poetry, she reclaims specifically feminine language – "vaginal red" – and writes a new form of mini-sequence, which Maiden calls 'cluster' poems. These cluster poems have almost the same start or the same end, but the rest of the poem veers off each time, so the repetition is like a motif. These poems question notions of voice and time, as if revealing parallel or expanding universes. The paintings of Georgia O'Keefe, gemstones and the poet's daughter are some of the actual inspirations in Mines, spinning the poems out into endless reflection.)

The Best Poem Of Jennifer Maiden

Old Europe Stared at Her Breakfast

(US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed those European countries which opposed the US attack on Iraq as only 'Old Europe')
Old Europe stared at her breakfast,
buttered her croissant, sipped coffee
which tasted like a gun
and blinked her grey eyes to restore the sun.
Old Europe grasped at the old A.J.P. Taylor
line, 'but in politics the impossible
always happens' more and more, hoped
for example, that the fact that the 'plant'
for weapons in Northern Iraq was shown
on the BBC an empty ex-Media
Centre, and miles away a plain village,
hoping not to be bombed, because by
mistake young Colin, who apparently
mistook often, used its name
at the UN as that of the 'plant',
would be accepted as a fact and then
protected, thought Old Europe
as her France loved to protect facts,
as her Germany to act, or her Belgium to be. But,
she reflected, in doubt and in debt,
the future is not an ally
over the sea which just needs to be
convinced but a masked soldier, dead
to Agincourt, Darmstadt, Verdun,
wanting oil and meat and not
understanding how a continental breakfast
keeps the blood in your head, your brain
not your gut. Old Europe set her spine
straight in the doorway sun. Her hand
crumbled bread as if it were old bone.

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