poetry
Hologrammatical
Puncher & Wattmann, 2023
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. Within this, his fifteenth collection, the KGB might even read a brilliant taxonomy of their leader with enough alarm to ensure the poet is fed calming tea. But these are serious times, and these poems are meditative acts of witness.
‘One of Australia’s foremost poets, Philip Salom is a poet of tremendous energy and imaginative richness whose work is characterised by a fiercely sensual responsiveness to landscape, people and objects. ’ Good Reads
‘Decades of experience inform Hologrammatical – Philip Salom’s new book is full of intricate, dazzling and defiant poems’ – Toby Davidson
Praise for Philip Salom’s poetry
‘There’s nothing bucolic about the poetry in Philip Salom’s Alterworld. Reading these poems can be uncomfortable, confronting and confusing, moving through a series of imagined worlds full of death, destruction, unhealthy sex and occasionally hope and nirvana (though no Salom nirvana is without its dark side). Taken as a collection, the book takes the reader on a journey that, despite the difficulty, is epic. There’s a huge and complex imagination at work here: with worlds as tightly plotted as that of any speculative fiction, and stories that drag us in, attract and repel at the same time. Once you’re sucked into these intimately related, but different worlds, it’s hard to look at life around you in quite the same way’
Magdalena Ball – Compulsive Reader