Poetry
Feeding the Ghost
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.
Praise for Feeding the Ghost
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
Conceptually exciting, verbally agile, provocative, humerous and sensual. More satisfying than any novel I’ve read recently.
David Gilbey, Australian Book Review
This collection firmly establishes Salom as one of this country’s most accomplished and versatile poets. Salom’s poetry is cosmopolitan and explores social and political themes with intelligence, wit and energy.
Judges Comment, Victorian Premier’s Prize