Julian May was born in Plymouth in 1955. He lived in Cornwall, near Truro, until going to university in Wales to study English and Drama. In 1981 he went to live in China where he taught English for two years in Xinxiang, a small city in Henan Province, and travelled widely in the People’s Republic and South East Asia. He now works for the BBC External Services.
Julian May’s poems have been published in Other Poetry, Outposts, Poetry Review, Thames Poetry and other magazines. Some of his short stories have been broadcast by Radio Four and BBC English by Radio and others have been published in Panurge and Poetry Matters. He has also written some short radio plays for English by Radio. In 1985 he received an Eric Gregory Award. The Earliest Memory, is Julian May’s first full collection and includes poems deriving from his Cornish childhood and from his more recent experience of China and South East Asia.
A room lit by Rembrandt where a family sits around the year’s first fire.
Two sisters at a table that dissolves into the dark; one draws the other while she reads. They avoid each other’s eyes.
The father is absent, yet his nearness weighs; across silence he commands from the farthest room the red scratching of his lamp-lit pen resounds
but is muffled by an armchair drawn to the hearth where the mother quickly knits a pair of orange mittens on her feet, warming her shins, he young son sits.
Between the dying blaze and the twitching fire she knots between her fists, he shares his shadowed gaze
feeling, already, the mittens cling to his clawing fingers burning in the snows, considering their mystery of warmth cast in that colour set fast by glowing coals.
THE EARLIEST MEMORY Price £4.40 per copy post free Cover illustration: Alison Seymour Williams Publication: December 1987 (64 pages laminated paperback)
