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.
‘One good swipe with the sword at the feet and the skeleton of the poem falls down laughing. That is Sibum’ 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.’