Böcker av Philip Salom

'Decades of experience inform Hologrammatical - Philip Salom's new book is full of intricate, dazzling, and defiant poems.' - Toby DavidsonPhilip 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.

Jack retreats to an Airbnb cottage in a small coastal town. As a writer he is pre-occupied with the phenomenon of found people: the Somerton Man, the Gippsland Man, the Isdal Woman, people who are found dead - their identities unknown or erased - and the mysterious pull this has on the public mind. In Blue Bay, as well as encountering the town's colourful inhabitants, Jack befriends Sarah, whose sister Alice is one of the many thousands of people who go missing every year. Sarah has been painting her sister's likeness in murals throughout the country, hoping that Alice will be found. Then Jack discovers a book about the people of the town, and about Sarah, which was written by a man who called himself Simon. Who once lived in the same cottage and created a backyard garden comprised of crazy mosaics. Until he too disappeared. While Sarah's life seems beholden to an ambiguous grief, Jack's own condition is unclear. Is he writing or dying? In The Fifth Season Philip Salom brings his virtuoso gifts for storytelling, humour and character to a haunting and unforgettable novel about the tenuousness of life and what it means to be both lost and found. 'An immensely wise, witty, recognisable and haunting story.' - Robert Drewe

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. The poems have satirical verve and sensuality, and are layered in surprising linguistic echoes; his imagination is almost architectural but also acutely social. Alterworld is extraordinary and unique.