Product Description
A new poet on the block, M A Carter is uncaring of the niceties and the pat expressions of much poetry within the status quo. Instead, Carter is mordant, immoderate, opinionated and likely to offend. He writes in a style that is distinctly musical and even lyrical but his observations stray wildly and eccentrically from the expected. His poems don’t mind being rude, or chauvinistic, even a bit scary. He admits this will not make him popular or admired, but he doesn’t care for popular or admired, he prefers to say what he thinks and be done with it. Until the next poem, that is. Carter thinks poetry plays safe, is less about integrity than it sounds, and is more about wooing the reader with phony affectations, those sequences of cliched and rhetorical love poems, nature musings with poets too fond of themselves … or self-congratulatory claims to ethics, books obsessed with the politics or landscape or both. M A Carter makes claims too, ironic, false claims usually. But what a bracing thing this is. What fun. Read him now.
M A Carter resides in Melbourne and has the upper floor of an apartment to himself. He and his sister Mary keep two cats who often sit, as he notes, “like apostrophes” on either side of him. His work has been read in public very occasionally and there is a very brief publication online, but he hasn’t been published widely in journals, nor in haiku form all over the world, nor has he been translated into twelve languages. This is his first major collection but won’t be his last if he can help it. His other profession is not stated though he admits to being a stirrer.
REVIEWS
“The trilogy highlights the ways in which multiplicity can create complexity and richness in a poet’s oeuvre. Fish and Carter allow Salom the freedom to explore different registers in his writing, without taking full responsibility for their poetry.” CASSANDRA ATHERTON, Australian Book Review
“Philip Salom is that rare thing in Australian poetry: a true avant-gardist, subverting the ‘lyrical I’ (or perhaps the lyrical narcissist) with Pessoa-like heteronyms who have no time for the niceties of contemporary poetry. Though he keeps a handle on his heteronyms (the ‘offensive’ MA Carter and the ‘love and death’ fixated Alan Fish) by having his own name on the cover as ‘editor’, Salom expands from his own identity as a poet and succeeds in producing two new, different styles and kinds of poetry for each heteronym – which he may not have written as Salom, yet paradoxically are unmistakably his own.” PETRA WHITE, SO LONG BULLETIN of Australian Poetry and Criticism
