Books

poetry

Hologrammatical

Philip Salom’s major new collection explores human and natural existence – as life-force and loss, and for diverse symptoms of achievement and folly. His intense scrutiny gives air to the unavoidable complexity of voices raised and voices ignored. Whether it’s injury and mortality (our own) or disturbance and urgency (our climate), Salom uses a subtle insight and a restless, inventive wit to create interweaving fugues through time and memory.

Fiction

Sweeney and the Bicycles

Written with warmth and humour, this captivatingly original novel opens us up to an intimate world of marvellous characters and unexpected developments. Trauma is balanced by the joys and weirdness of everyday life. Friendship and family just may be found in the unlikeliest of places.

Fiction

The Fifth Season

Set in a small coastal town, The Fifth Season is a haunting and intriguing tale about a writer who is pre-occupied with the phenomenon of found people, a mural artist with a missing sister, and an old book that bears a striking resemblance to real life events…

The Fifth Season was long listed for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Fiction

The Returns

A story about the eccentricities, failings and small triumphs that humans are capable of, a novel that pokes fun at literary and artistic pretensions, while celebrating the expansiveness of art, kindness and friendship…

The Returns was a finalist in the 2020 Miles Franklin Award, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Queensland Premier’s Prize.

Fiction

Waiting

A story of two odd couples in prose as marvellously idiosyncratic as its characters…

Waiting was shortlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin Award, the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Prize and the 2017 Prime Minister’s Award.

Poetry

Alterworld

When Peter Porter noted the brilliance of Philip Salom’s poems and said they were unlike anything in Australian poetry, he was referring to Sky Poems (1987), an ironic otherworld of the twentieth century and the first book of the Alterworld trilogy. Salom later added The Well Mouth (2005), an underworld of limbo and stopped-life to counter Sky Poems’ endless possibilities. Now the accidental realities of Alterworld reach into the twenty-first century but remain haunted by Salom’s ambiguous visions of life and death. 

Poetry

Keepers

Keepers is highly entertaining and serious; there are brilliant flashes and reflections, ironic observations and a lot of humour. The poems form stories and portraits of recognisable and unrecognisable people who teach and study in a School of Arts. The ironic observations of Fish, flâneur and Go player, form a narrative underlying the poems.

Poetry

The Keeper of Fish

Alan Fish was writing poetry before his life went dark. He let it collect like a tank of rain-water. His subject matter? Love and death. His poetry is deeply haunted and lyrical in its privacy but also ironically observant and public. Alan Fish left his basement in the Print Room, left his Keepers behind him and struck out on his own.

Poetry

Keeping Carter

A new poet on the block, M A Carter is uncaring of the niceties and the pat expressions of much poetry within the status quo. Instead, Carter is mordant, immoderate, opinionated and likely to offend. He writes in a style that is distinctly musical and even lyrical but his observations stray wildly and eccentrically from the expected.

Poetry

The Well Mouth

This expansive collection recalls Philip Salom’s acclaimed Sky Poems and confirmed his reputation as one of Australia’s leading poets of imagination and narrative invention. As a book, The Well Mouth is both lyrical and sardonic, humorous and bare. Containing many individually brilliant poems, it accumulates into a work of real beauty and force.

Fiction

Toccata & Rain

Simon reluctantly finds himself at the centre of a controversy over two large sculptural spires he has constructed in his suburban backyard in Melbourne. A television interview results in a late-night phone call from a wife in Perth, of whom he has no recollection. Suddenly Simon is plunged into a psychological maelstrom that has at its centre a childhood trauma so horrific in its consequences, he gradually realises that he has been trying to escape from it all his life. Compelling, mysterious and erotically charged, Toccata slowly peels back the layers, ambiguities and complexities of one mans life. The result is a startling virtuoso performance.

Poetry

New and Selected Poems

“A poet of tremendous energy and imaginative richness, Philip Salom’s poetry has been characterised by a vividly, sometimes fiercelysensual responsiveness to landscapes, people and objects. This major selection from his seven previous books shows his great range and growth in stature from the physicality of the early rural poems, to the internationally acclaimed Sky Poems, and, most recently, the inventiveness and passionate affirmations of love in The Rome Air Naked. Finally, among his new poems, is the long-awaited inclusion of the moving ‘Elegy for My Father’, winner of the 1996 Newcastle Poetry Prize…”

Fiction

Playback

Jack Biner, folklorist and gifted listener, imagines Windrup is just another country town. But soon he is entrusted with the vivid and often moving world of people’s memories. His need to remain an impartial collector is shaken. He finds he must live through much more than his own dilemmas as he meets Mrs Bukowski, the moody landlady; Laura, the painter; her cagey husband; and the enigmatic Fisher…
Playback is a richly imaginative, playful and sensual work that explores history, repression, silence, love, and the power of art. And, finally, the elusive question, what is ‘truth’?.

Poetry

Sky Poems

Sky Poems, Philip Salom’s third collection of poetry, opens out onto a new world – the Sky world – where reality is constantly being forged from the memories and experiences of its protagonists. Anything thought of in this world, anything desired, is instantly made real.

Here are people and their patterns of mind caught in poems of great intensity, eroticism and power. Intellectually, emotionally, and linguistically adventurous, this is poetry that challenges yet remains accessible; it is forthright, passionate and deeply felt, yet disciplined and exceptionally well-crafted. It evidences a poet approaching the full pitch of his imagination and art.