The Porcupine's Quill

‘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.

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‘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.’

—Michael Greenstein, Books in Canada

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‘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.’

—Fraser Sutherland, Globe & Mail

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‘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.’

—Harold Rhenisch, Vallum

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‘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.’

—The Vancouver Sun

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‘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 Montreal Gazette

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‘The fare Sibum provides covers the four spiritual food groups -- humour, seriousness, discipline, humility -- and is therefore wholesome and nutritive.’

—David Solway, Director’s Cut

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‘One of our most modern poets.... There is no nostalgia about his classicism, no resignation in his satire.’

—Carcanet Press

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‘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.’

—Michael Schmidt (Director, The Writing School, Manchester Metropolitan University)

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‘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.’

—Poetry Nation

Unpublished endorsement

‘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