Philip Salom



The Dark Placebo

Placebo: if resolutions are like insights I must make them only to lose them. Do I lose more than can be made? If things gained are better felt when lost: their shadow falls as the proof of things worsening. Placebo-fear …

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Julian Novitz Reviews Philip Salom

‘How much of human life is lost in waiting!’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, ‘Prudence’. Philip Salom’s excellent third novel takes this condition as its title and theme, focusing on four characters who have become mired, to greater or lesser degrees, within their lives and locations.

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Discourse on Blue: Three Colours

1) Tyres at blue speed a TV channel off-tune we see is jammed on Blue. The foil wrapper rattles the wind, is a disappearing. It flies in blue schema. It’s sound makes us watch, this scene is sound. 2) Her …

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Philip Salom Launches Judith Crispin

What’s immediately significant about Judith Crispin’s poems is how strange they are. They bring into focus a world which is vital, lit, emotionally open and compassionate, but one which is also other-worldly, subject to laws and visions and visitations which are not those of conventional dailiness. This world of The Myrrh Bearers is animistic, shadowy, elegiac, and is certainly not routine and logical. Despite many who believe otherwise, our world isn’t routine and logical either. If it were so, would we bother getting up in the morning?

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Review Short: Philip Salom’s Alterworld

Philip Salom’s Alterworld is much more than a standard ‘new and selected’. Two major books, Sky Poems (first published 1987, FACP) and The Well Mouth (2005, FACP) are reworked, and a new collection completes the three.

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Review Short: Philip Salom’s Between Yes and No

Philip Salom is a poet and novelist who has, like several others of his generation, made a career straddling academia and a kind of award-and fellowship-winning literary writing (see the long list on his personal website) that has enabled him to retire in his late fifties to write full time.

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Discourse on Red: Three Colours

1) The traffic light is red hiatus. Imagery refers your nerves to blood and worry, the universal specialists. Is blood primary? If no one’s heart is opened to beat or stop by moments or edits or from this traffic light …

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Review Short: Benedict Andrew’s Lens Flare

Lens Flare is a collection of poems – the first, as far as I can tell – written by a theatre director more accustomed to staging Chekhov in New York or Verdi in Denmark than to publishing poems in Australian journals. I opened the book expecting to find that slightly off-key poetry written by accomplished practitioners of an allied practice – this could also be song-writing, fiction, even painting – whose singular depth of involvement is unquestioned, but is not in poetry.

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Acupuncturist; Under the Needles

He’s rather soulful, someone said Half-undressed, your hands crossed on your chest, you might be lying in state but you are now the calmest of short deaths in a room that’s calming, rectilinear, worn smooth by New Age silence. Even …

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Inclusiveness, Dunedin

for Ivan Klima They tell you: all the seasons in a day Mist overnight: in early morning like a silver lid. To someone unused to it mist seems to pass right through the body, by which I mean the mind. …

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