I have been an enthusiastic reader of Philip Salom’s poetry since the appearance of his first collection, The Silent Piano, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1981. In the books which followed, particularly the often overlooked The Projectionist and multi-award winning Sky Poems, Salam maintained the strong, muscular, even aggressive individual voice he claimed with his first published work. I was therefore delighted when I began to explore The Rome Air Naked to discover the best of his new poems had not lost any of that youthful swagger, confidence and playfulness with language so strongly mapped in his earlier work. Also present are Salom’s seemingly earnest fascination with his own sexual yearning and expression and the skill to build an engaging surrealist narrative.

It is unusual for a poet to provide an introduction to a new verse collection. In the case of The Rome Air Naked it is entirely appropriate. The introduction not only allows Salam to construct a setting for the genesis of the poems but provides an opportunity for him to explain the unusual layout of the words on the page.

In Rome, a resident in the Whiting Library/Studio with the support of the Australia Council’s literature program, working on a range of material including a novel, poetry and some material for performance, Salam became fascinated with the potential of his new laptop computer – beguiled by the flexibility of this new piece of equipment and the opportunity it provided to play with words and phrases, to experiment with layered texts.

In his introduction, Salom indicates many of the poems connect to the ‘mass of letters I was writing home to my lover’. Therefore the text he manipulated on his computer screen included letters, pieces of prose and fragments of poems. By arranging patterns of boxed or framed scripts or placing one form of writing within another, he found unusual connections and associations were established. These ‘concurrent poems’, he suggests, ‘stimulate visual responses to the “poem” which are quite different from the usual customs and conventions of layout’. Another experiment in arrangement he names as ‘poems of dissociation’, where he has used the flexibility offered by the computer screen to cut and paste, allowing him to place the random re-assembled lines and phrases in a different landscape text to stimulate the reader into making unexpected association between symbol and meaning. Salam believes ‘The form deliberately suspends, then delays or defers meaning.’

Although I share Philip Salom’s enthusiasm for the potential of multimedia presentation of poetry, I found this experimental layout on the conventional printed page unsatisfactory. Unlike the computer screen where there is the opportunity for inter-activity, an ability to constantly change the shape of the text, sliding material from one position to another, the traditional printed page is static. I found the maze of boxed texts or poems gloved in unrelated prose distracting. I agree with the author’s claim in his introduction that there is no one way to read or enter the body of a poem. Each reader will approach a poem with a particular language sense, a variety of visual references and a compulsion to interpret meaning and symbol, to extend the narrative according to the dictates of their imagination and the poem’s power to shadow their experience. The poem’s music, the ripples of association which move away from the central image, and the power of the language are all elements which will assist the reader in building a response often unexpected, unusual or strangely at odds with the poet’s intention. This magic occurs even in a conventional lay out of text.

Among the poems experimental in layout I found the sparseness and angularity of ‘The Iron Comparisons’ the most successful. The toughness of the language, mood and meaning are strengthened by the structure of the poem on the page. It reminded me of the shaped poems of Dylan Thomas, in which form and meaning are closely related. The Roman experience was clearly an important stimulant to Salom’s writing. The pattern of the city at rooftop level, its history and religious associations permeate most of the best poems. The furniture and language of the city streets; fountains, sculptured angels, tourist monuments are a backcloth to the poet’s yearning for an absent lover. It is the love poems, richly sensual and erotic, which I found the most powerful and immediate in this collection. At times I felt like a voyeur. It was as if I had stumbled in on an intimate moment and did not possess the willpower to retreat.

I must close up like a sea-form you have opened in me. God, to open then to close … you have travelled to and from me, hack to where we’ll live as greedy lovers but not for three months yet.

Based on letters, these poems taste and smell of sexual passion. Poems like ‘Erotic Ghazals’ and ‘Beyond the Bed Edge, Am’ shout their sexuality and declare a delight in the acrobatics of lovemaking without reserve. ‘Two for Rilke’ is a memorable piece of writing, keenly crafted and combining the music of language, a reflective mood and a quality of idea which communicate great energy.

I’ve lived here quivering, naked, among the icons
and mere beginnings, in poetry and life, briefly you
in this, but all passion holds the risk of emptiness.

The Rome Air Naked is a challenging collection. Salom takes risks. His voice lies outside much of the fashionable obsessions evident in contemporary Australian poetry. He is a poet of bucking sensuality with a sense of the comic and the absurd. A poet most rewarding to read.