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Poetry; POE 011000
February 2002
128 pages
ISBN 0-88984-230-2
$14.95
Girls and
Handsome Dogs
Norm Sibum
A lonely woman in the country attempts a crossword during a thunderstorm.
Police stop a suspicious character who endeavours to explain his unusual behaviour.
On his way to a dinner date, a man walks and wonders if his `need'
is too obvious. Often comic, sometimes somber, these poems offer
a narrative of the exotic and the ordinary, the ridiculous and the sublime.
I went often to the town `Sibum has a natural gift for meditative narrative, a quite powerful
instinctive sense of appropriate form, and a wonderful and diverse
eloquence in the old sense of that word.' `One good swipe with the sword at the feet and the skeleton of the poem falls down
laughing. That is Sibum's signature. To get an idea of how it looks on the ground,
imagine taking an anthology of Victorian, pre-Raphaelite and Modernist poetry,
tearing all the pages out, scattering them around on the floor in a central library
in Baghdad, letting the looters walk over them for a few days, and then reassembling
them -- or what's left of them. The resulting combination of randomness and order would approximate
what can found between the covers of Sibum's bed.' `Girls and Handsome Dogs by Norm Sibum is an eccentric work. Halfway
into it, I confess I felt like the lady in Sibum's poem "A Bash at
Aginthorpe's" who is not shy to admit to her host: "I haven't the
foggiest/As to what you could possibly be on about." Yet, preparing this
review, I found myself copying out line after line, quotes that I
coveted as guarantors of Sibum's talent.' `One of our most modern poets.... There is no nostalgia about his classicism,
no resignation in his satire.' `He creates a very original kind of dialectic between present and past,
in which each illuminates and penetrates the other ... there is in his approach
none of that bright post-modern cynicism that makes everything grist
to the solipsistic mill of the present.'
To conduct business in the place
With a populace of zealots, with other patriots.
The cows stood in their pastures. Fish swam in trout pools.
The librarian liked her gin, her men,
Her Dashiell Hammett novels. Everyone had weather
Good or bad, the bed and breakfast cedar-shingled
In the woods.
- from `Hypatia'
-- Michael Schmidt (Director,
The Writing School, Manchester Metropolitan University)
-- Harold Rhenisch, Vallum
-- Andrew Steinmetz, Montreal Review of Books
-- Carcanet Press
-- Poetry Nation
`A world is glimpsed from the corner of his eye, a multiplicity
of voices is briefly overheard. From these Sibum has made a rough,
durable fabric; he is a Browning for our times while at the same time
having developed a voice that is completely his own.'
-- Marius Kociejowski
`It is difficult to write poetry about God, alcohol, the disenfranchised,
and spititual identity without rewriting every post-modern poetic cliché
offered up over the last fifty years. Poet Norm Sibum is up to the challenge,
though, and in Girls and Handsome Dogs he spins interesting poems
on the big subjects, rife with imaginative symbolism, quick wit and naked
clarity of thought.'
-- Quill and Quire
`Girls and Handsome Dogs is a return of sorts for Norm Sibum. He has
never been widely read in Canada, and his two previous collections were
published in England. A terse citation in Michael Schmidt's influential
Lives of the Poets can be credited with starting a Sibum renaissance,
for only two Canadian poets are so much as mentioned in that vast tome.
Schmidt bruised a lot of egos with his cursory treatment of Canadian
verse, but he also piqued the curiosity of more than a few readers.
Sibum's neglect within Canada is a travesty, but an understandable one,
for he writes verse that is urbane, stately, aristocratic, and decidedly
unfashionable. Much of his work recalls early Eliot in its tone, its
flexible yet regular sense of form, and its half-modern vision of the
world. His previous collection, The November Propertius, is aptly
titled, for there is something of the aging yet playful Roman about much
of Sibum's verse.'
-- Jack Illingworth, amazon.ca
`Norm Sibum has lived in Canada for over 30 years, and has published a dozen books of poems,
yet is still little known. This, I suppose, is because he gives every indication of being a loner.
He is a poet fascinated by incongruity and odd juxtapositions. He tends to pose as an inconspicuous observer
commenting wryly on the strange people and events he sees around him in a dead-pan and highly allusive style.
This style is erudite in reference, requiring readers not only to keep their wits about them
but also to be imaginative enough to make connections between statements
that often appear challenging and discontinuous.
Girls and Handsome Dogs, attractively produced by the Porcupine's Quill, possesses
the same quirky wit and insight that characterizes his earlier work. Prominent within it
is a long poem, Aginthorpe on the Divan, that follows its main character through the drunken
aftermath of a party in a series of poems that have the surreal vividness
of a dream -- and may, in part, be presented as dream. In it we encounter a view
of the contemporary world in all its bemusing combination of the absurd, the sublime,
and the horrific. It is one of those puzzling if somewhat infuriating poems
that do not give up their secrets easily but reveal enough to intrigue the mind
and invite continued rereadings that prove more rewarding each time.
Sibum, then, is his own man, and writes poetry that, for good or ill, is like no one else's.
It can be as challenging as a cryptic crossword (one of his poems is actually about a crossword)
and can become similarly addictive. An acquired taste, perhaps, but one that deserves
to be both sampled and savored.'
-- W J Keith, Canadian Book Review Annual
Photo by Mary Harman