The Well Mouth is ambitious and challenging, then, but this is characteristic of Salom, who creates a tripartite form that functions in some ways as a verse novel or poetic drama: Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915) married to Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002). The plot tracks the decomposing body of the murdered woman as it drifts towards the sea, as well as her coming to an enhanced consciousness not only of what has happened to her but of what happens to others in the transition from life to death. As ‘the lurker from hell, living in the briefest gaps, your disconnection’, she responds to each voice. By Part 3, she characterises herself as ‘the lake of him [and others] listening’, commenting, correcting, comparing and meditating on human hopes and failures.

The idiosyncratic punctuation, font and layout of her comments are some of the ways in which Salom plays with meaning. He presents sustained or brief monologues from a variety of characters, and the murdered woman’s responses appear in italics, usually at the bottom of the page. Sometimes these meditations flow over onto the next, but don’t necessarily begin at the top; sometimes the comments seem to spill over from one page end to another, offering alternative readings. The implicit invitation to readers to make multiple meanings recalls Salom’s stylistic experiments in The Rome Air Naked (1996), where he speaks of felicitous ‘mis-readings’.

This innovation and variety of focalisation offered by a multitude of characters can cause confusion, but it is also what makes The Well Mouth a rich meditation on death and dying. Salom allows readers to witness murder, accident and suicide in graphic detail as they hear ‘the echoes of the dead’. This is not mere sensationalism, however. The text engages as a meditation on both process and product. What is death, when is the moment of passing, what is left behind, what endures when ‘all lives end with the story still running’? This is a book about the boundaries between being and not being, body and spirit; it is also about altering perspectives, and so the text rings changes on the fecund central metaphor. The well mouth can be ‘a fixed pupil’, but the consciousness can look up as well as down. If it can absorb other images from last moments, does this mean it achieves an overview? ‘Is this perhaps / not a well at all / but a tower?’, the murdered woman asks.

Salom also meditates naturally on the resources and limits of language. We use words to tell the story of ourselves; poetry, that highly charged language, in particular tries to say what we mean. The collection could be described as:

a poem full of irony: the doubleness
of life/death, a presence where it isn’t.
a poem is becoming pauses inside story

poems written alive with the eyes closed
by poets fearful alert because they know
well a poem is death with its eyes open

Poetry wants to get to the heart, the failing/failed/decaying hearts of Salom’s characters.

One of the rewards of The Well Mouth is its formal and linguistic virtuosity. Salom exploits a wide frame of expression and reference, offering dazzling extended metaphors, poems rich in idiomatic play and ghazals, for instance. While not all of these are equally successful, they temper the brooding tone. Salom’s poetry can be intensely visual, as ‘driving as the sexual hunger of the eye’, when it tries to capture every nuance in a landscape as if it were being seen for the first (and last) time.

There is irony and black comedy in The Well Mouth, too. Air bags are ‘big bosomy mamas’ in a monologue spoken by a pedestrian killed in a freak multiple car crash. Another poem cleverly displaces emotion onto cars dragged from a muddy river by the police: ‘Holdens more suicidal than most … You just / can’t tell: always thought the anxious ones were the Fords.’ Near the conclusion, the bent cop–murderer of the woman boasts: ‘… I’m the blackest mussel / in the fucking river. Cook me, see my pretty orange tongue. / It’s not saying anything.’

Some of the irritation alluded to at the beginning of this review evaporates once readers fall into the rhythms of the book. Some has to do with the prefabricated feel of certain poems or their abstruseness and the sameness of occasional voices, which lose individuality. The inclusion of material about the tsunami and refugees seems artificial; it breaks the collection’s tonal consistency.

That said, The Well Mouth is absorbing and challenging. Salom digs deeply into the resources of language and culture to unearth our responses to ways of dying by creating a voice that is aware, as it channels the last moments of others, of its eventual dissolution. Can poetry in fact succeed, the collection implicitly asks, since it tries to capture ‘the how of life from death’?