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 roving, 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. Praise for Alterworld: ‘There’s a huge and complex imagination at work here: with worlds as tightly plotted as that of any speculative fiction. 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. Though I think that each of the books is powerful in itself, having these three together creates a far grander picture, where each poem is informed by, changed, and strengthened by those around it.’ – Magdalena Ball, The Compulsive Reader Praise for The Keeper of Fish and Keeping Carter: (Salom) is like Gwen Harwood or James McAuley and Harold Stewart, a trickster-prankster (Harwood's own term for herself). If these two heteronyms are read as 'language masquerading as men' then Fish becomes 'fishy' and Carter 'carts' his fictive baggage from one page to the next. Fish and Carter are Salom's homunculi … For their fierce poetic intelligence, their experimentation and their comedy, these books are 'keepers'. – Cassandra Atherton ABR
