‘Sibum’s ability to combine the classical with pop culture is such that one needs to approach his text with an intellect that is as manoeuvrable as a classic sports car. ... This collection’s ideal reader is the person whose life exceeds the recommended daily dose of decadence.’
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.