Philip Salom – April 15 2018

Philip began writing poetry as part of his Literature and Creative Writing degree at Curtin University, and took up poetry writing in earnest from the late 1970s. Having grown up on a dairy farm, he studied at Muresk Agricultural College and enrolled in Agricultural Science at the University of Western Australia. Philip worked on a cattle research station and held casual jobs as a gardener and painter before developing an interest in writing during a trip to New Zealand in 1972. His first book of poetry, The Silent Piano, was his first publication, something quite rare for publishing in the 1980s. It won the (British) Commonwealth Poetry Prize for best first collection of poetry in 1981. He has since published many poetry collections and two novels, Playback and Toccata & Rain: A novel. Philip has received many writing grants, fellowships and awards, including the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Award. He has travelled widely as a guest writer and lecturer, and has taught creative writing at a number of Australian universities including Murdoch, Curtin, Deakin, and the University of Melbourne. Philip also writes under the psuedonyms MA Carter and Alan Fish.

Alterworld
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015; ISBN 9781922186669
A “three-in-one” volume, creative deliberations based eccentrically on large worlds or paradigms – Heaven, Hell and Life. Alterworld combines two of Philip’s best known but out of print earlier books: Sky Poems (the Sky world – where reality is constantly being forged from the memories and experiences of its protagonists; anything thought of in this world, anything desired, is instantly made real) and The Well Mouth (a verse novel of sorts – at the bottom of an abandoned well, a woman murdered and dumped there by corrupt police dreams the voices of people who have died but do not yet know it) with a new collection in the same vein which can also be regarded as a kind of metaphysical verse novel about Life as we might know it.

New and Selected Poems
Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998; ISBN 9781863682183
A poet of tremendous energy and imaginative richness, Philip Salom’s poetry has also been characterised by a vividly, sometimes fiercely sensual 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 inventive and passionate affirmations of love in ‘The Rome Air Naked’. Includes the poems ‘Summer celebration’ (epilepsy view from the ground), ‘The disabled and the ones of pain’ (dream of lifting pain) and ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’ (memory loss) and the long-awaited, moving ‘Elegy for My Father’.