Poetry
New and Selected Poems
Fremantle Press, 1998
Shortlistings:
1999 Victorian Premiers Prize for Poetry
1999 Western Australian Premiers Prize for Poetry
“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…”
Praise for New and Selected Poems
Philip Salom’s poems make up an exceedingly impressive and interesting body of work and engage the reader intellectually and emotionally in a new way … a vision and a voice that seem original. This is a rich imagination, sometimes seemingly madcap, but always wonderfully controlled.
Herbert C Jaffa, New York University
An almost unfailingly dazzling group of poems. The last section … contains many of the book’s most profound poems, including ‘The Anywhere Graves’ and ‘The Glass’, an astounding meditation on memory and perception, in which a girl with a glass eye comes to represent “the glass eye of the town, slipped in and out of someone’s memory …” To read Salom’s New and Selected Poems is to find oneself in the company of a poet whose imagination is sparked by both quotidian and lofty things, and who is able to make poetry of either.
Margot Schilpp, Verse
Salom is a poet of full-on intensity, every word works … His poems are necessarily dramatic affairs, though the drama is in the detail not in the action – in rich colouring and elaborate textures, in the sudden opening of spatial and temporal perspectives, in a poetic language dense with metaphors and allegorical attributions.
Ivor Indyk Australian, Book Review
New & Selected Poems affords space to witness the development of a generous, restless talent, a poet with a rhapsodic gift. The longer poems often strike the ear like hymns – they at once sue for and manifestly construct the beauty of the world, in Simone Weil’s sense of that phrase.
Kerry Leves, Overland