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Poetry; POE 011000
October 2004
92 pages
ISBN 0-88984-249-3
$14.95
Intimations of a Realm
in Jeopardy
Norm Sibum
David Solway's Director's Cut, a volume
of essays that irritated poetry-lovers nationwide, set an agenda
for poems that `are so verbally rich and juicy, they are like
peaches you have to take your shirt off to eat.' Eccentric,
bitingly modern and stridently classical, these are those poems. Imagine
a Fellini film about Wallace Stevens, with a script by Robert Browning. You're
getting close.
With Girls and Handsome Dogs, his much-acclaimed earlier book of poems,
Norm Sibum established himself as a major poet, assured in the distinctive
mastery of his art while continuing to press his poetic quest ever further
into new voices, new depths, new cadences. Nobody writes quite like Norm
Sibum, with his wholly original fusion of the vernacular and the classical,
the epic and the epigrammatic. Now, in Intimations of a Realm in Jeopardy,
Sibum reveals himself as a poet of a slow apocalypse that rattles the crockery
not in extravagant thunder but in forlorn coffee shops and pizza joints, in
down-at-heel apartment houses, among tough waitresses and stoical
street-philosophers. `One heard the chill of empire in / The pinging of
spoons against porcelain.' With an elegiac sadness that owes as much
to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson as to Propertius and Theocritus,
Norm Sibum takes us in his magnificent new collection on a voyage into the
shadows of a waning realm that we recognize finally as our own. As we
follow this Apollonius with a steel guitar, we come to understand that
the `realm in jeopardy' of which Sibum has made himself the supreme
singer is not only our civic order, so menaced of late, but the sovereign
realm of love itself. Sibum's great theme has always been the relations
between men and women in and out of love, overshadowed by the forces of
history. In poem after poem of this magnificent collection he lifts
this motif to unexpected and exhilarating levels of funky insight,
wry humor and the sheerest lyrical intensity.
`Montreal poet Norm Sibum's narrative poems are not everyone's
cup of tea; they are, rather, bottles of wine that have been sitting
in cellars, collecting the dust of meaning and growing in complexity and peril.
His characters and situations are reminiscent of Robert Browning's, but
instead of breathing air they exhale and inhale the exhaust of
apocalyptic times. This can be seen in the intriguing vagueness
of Norm Sibum's title, Intimations of a Realm in Jeopardy,
which, in turn, is re-enacted in each of the twelve long, lyrical,
impressionistic poems in this latest collection.' `Mostly, Sibum's triumphs are musical and based not so much
on lines as on larger linguistic units: rhetorical repetitions,
rhythmic variations, the ebb and flow of phrases that construct
stanza-length cadences.' `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 be found between the covers of Sibum's bed.' `Sibum manages to evoke the universal mood of a coffeeshop on
the main drag of the world, where big ideas are discussed
amid interruptions from the mundane.' `His form resembles a fashion designer's work -- a single piece of cloth
shaped into a lovely dress with nothing but a quick twist, a tuck
and a stitch to hold it stylishly together. Sibum's forms are often
free but well crafted; they dissolve into the words flowing through them.' `The fare Sibum provides covers the four spiritual food groups -- humour,
seriousness, discipline, humility -- and is therefore wholesome and nutritive.' `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 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.' `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.'
-- Michael Greenstein, Books in Canada
-- Fraser Sutherland, the Globe & Mail
-- Harold Rhenisch, Vallum
-- The Vancouver Sun
-- The Montreal Gazette
-- David Solway, Director's Cut
-- Michael Schmidt (Director,
The Writing School, Manchester Metropolitan University)
-- Carcanet Press
-- Poetry Nation
-- Marius Kociejowski
Photo by Mary Harman