The Well Mouth By Philip Salom, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005, 94 pages, paperback, $24.95. Reviewed by Stephen Lawrence in the July 2006 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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'I breathe air into poems' A gripping, unified, sustained and powerful poetry collection.
Salom is now a very accomplished writer, much improved from even five years ago when his A Cretive Life and its light ironies bounced away from insight. His writing then demonstrated a tourist's research, his poems showed their price-tags. However, with eleven publications to his name (the overenthusiastic cover blurb twice mentions his 'fecundity'), seven of them through the Fremantle Press, he has grown into a superior poet.
The Well Mouth's structure gives it traction and is the source of its fascination. A woman killed by crooked cops is disposed of in a well, and left to drift out to sea. But the remains -- her victimhood, and other death-marked characters of whom she becomes aware -- cannot stay quiet.
It's worth asking why, after being chucked into a well, she's suddenly an expert on death. Yet she convinces because the poet leads us further, advancing into deeper complexities and truths.
Talk of words and language's building blocks weave in and out: The language of his house
was always clean: they did not do
the nouns and verbs which dirty it...
If you buck the end of a sentence
it throws the reader off...
(p 37) '...the sharp teeth / of Helvetica' (p 10), 'she, wordless, punctuates herself' (p 28), 'words like the ground, the frost, the poetry lost from / the alphabet she breathed' (p 35), 'words read under the light: the page- / down encyclopedia of night' (p 48). It is as if her dissolution is echoed in the way words are seen.
The undertow of the dead narrator provides commentary throughout: invisible noises hum about the ears of the living. (The famous quote from The Tempest titling Salom's Prologue is given as lines 130--35 in the Alexander text.) The ghostly presence is both listening -- 'I am underwater / but I hear through tubes of daylight' -- and speaking. Her post-sentient musings and observations are represented by the poems.
Sometimes the imperative to speak, to have an input, takes over a page or soaks up into the poems themselves: remember me...
Is this perhaps
not a well at all
but a tower?
remember me(p 78) It's a persuasive conjoining of form and function, yet using italics to denote speaking voices (both quick and après vie) and the italicised dead narrator can confuse.
As well as this, the language goes shaky when he's portraying dumbass blokes, when gangsters rap or a 'rampant V8 Rambo' appears (pp 75-7) -- or when he's invoking 'Pulp Fiction' (pp 32-3). It's as if a righteous abhorrence at these culpable characters gets the better of Salom's skills, and his voice goes wobbly and unconvincing:No Rambo shit in here, man. This is slick, I mean you don't take all the killing serious, don't be that uncool. You don't believe that good/bad shit anymore, do you?
Foot massage, Ezekiel...
(p 32) Although he is always attentive to the effect of language upon reality, Salom can try too hard: 'the laksa-coloured soils after rain the grass / thinning into Nullarbor and the red-shift / soil with its mascot of eagles' (p 52). And he labours the wounding -- the fracturing bone, the 'dark unphotogenic gunshots' -- a little overmuch.
But they are necessary to his tale. Words and experience have their own music, and Caliban's 'sounds, and sweet airs' appear throughout: Bees made an organ in the wall beside my desk:
not Bach, more the monochords of Philip Glass
I keep hearing bees now that I am dead.
(p 19) The writing may often be dense -- at all times teasing the reader to look twice -- but it is not impenetrable. These poems are Totenleider, 'the pain playing like excruciating [sic] / music' (p 39), presenting varieties of death and pain: 'a poem is death with its eyes open'. (p 61)
He's not quite saying anything new, but Salom has found a novel spin on narrative poetry.
Citation - Stephen Lawrence. 'Review: The Well Mouth by Philip Salom' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 26 May 2013].
Back Cover Blurb - 'Salom shows, that in Australian poetry, imaginative fecundity is not solely Les Murray's domain. His fecundity is a kind of praise, but it is never easy: death, the difficulty of change, and the pains of preservation are always present'. - David McCooey, The Age
'Salom's imagination is large and generous. He is one of those poets able to give his readers the sense that they are witnessing his revelations unfold moment by moment ... (Salom) gets his language to acquire both head and heart'. - Judith Beveridge, Island
'(Salom) comes through his dazzling poems like a Roman on a motor scooter. His poems have a splendid grip on the physical world, its complexity and sheen. 'The Family Fig Tree' is a masterpiece'. - Barry Hill, The Australian
Have You Also Read? Kayang and Me
 Kim Scott and Hazel Brown, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005, 270 Pages, Paperback, $29.95Reviewed by Christine Choo in the July 2006 issue.Set in the Southwest of Western Australia, in country claimed by both authors to be the place that owns them, Kayang and Me is the fruit of collaboration between senior Aboriginal woman, Kayang Hazel Brown, and the younger Kim Scott. Brown, matriarch of a large extended family, has a vast store of memories and stories of times past, family and kin relationships which provide context and depth of knowledge to Scott's explorations of his identity and connections to Brown's family and the wider Noongar community. For Scott, now an accomplished author, this is the third book in which he explores his own Aboriginality. His first novel, True Country, a semi-autobiographical work of fiction, ... read more.
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Issue 44
Popular Music: Practices, Formations and Change - Australian Perspectives
