Penguin, 1993

Award shortlistings:

• 1993   Victorian Premiers Prize for Poetry 

• 1993   National Book Council Banjo Award

• 1993   Western Australian Premiers Prize

This volume enlarged Philip Salom’s reputation as a poet of great range and inventiveness. Increasingly, there is humour and a mordant wit emerging among poems already lively with his unique blend of sensuality and vivid imagination. His poems shift flently between Australia, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, with themes as various as oceans, sex, greed, music, the computer culture; as paradoxical as the thylacine; as complex as the humid tropical cultures described so intensely in his brilliant Singapore sequence.

Salom’s characteristic sense of the metaphysical is both continued and debunked in these poems of restless perception.

Philip Salom’s poems are proof of the power that is in the form. His subjects are more urgent than most and his technique rises to brilliance. He’s one of the most intelligent poets in Australia.

Michael Sharkey

Feeding the Ghost is full of challenging and superb poems activated by much more mysterious triggers. An energetic, intelligent and assertive personality.

Martin Duwell, The Australian

Salom seems at home with a permanent sense of dislocation, and his meditations can lead inwards as well as outwards … As well as zest and sensuality, Salom has an odd, fresh range of perception.

Sean O’Brien, Times Literary Supplement