The Pangborn Defence, a departure from Sibum's previous verse, will be something of a surprise for those who have followed his career. Poems written as letters to personages both real and imagined, there are political undertones to many rarely seen in Sibum's ouevre. But there is still the same attention to detail, the same craftsmanship, humour, love and originality.
The most famous use of the phrase sub divo appears in Horace’s ode on patriotism, in which the poet enjoins the young to embrace the military, to suffer poverty, and, in a life of service to the nation, be sub divo (“under the sky”). In this collection of poems, however, Norm Sibum suggests that we are all of us sub divo, no matter who or what we are. Living under a sky from which there is no escape, with the “conversion of value to parody almost complete,” our poets are as likely to be fascists as they are rebels or conscientious objectors. “Shall we talk it up,” he asks his friend Foulard: “how we’re isolate / In our skins … Harps strung for satire and plunging tears?” Personal, epistolary, corrosive, vented with Sibum’s classical spleen and explosive prosody, Sub Divo delves into the “slap-happy passion” and the “colonial, scrappy, boisterous business” of American culture—while at the same time asking what future there is for a world “divided even now / In the only places where we cohere,” when “all the disparate pieces drifting in us / Pine one for the other and look / For the ceremony that will join them.”
`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.
`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.' - Harold Rhenisch - Vallum
Smoke and Lilacs is full of play and shadow, whispered intimations of mortality and glances of humour, elegiac lyric playing against steely classicism, an easy modern vernacular eliding with timeless grace. Sibum's meditative narratives move between worlds, modern and ancient, the state of our civic order and the realm of love. Human love and lust exist within the forces of empire - Rome or America. Men and women continue to ask of life 'from what god does it come, / To what serendipity does it go / if chance is all and all there's been?', and the gods 'laugh at those who laugh at chance'. Across centuries, voices create a complex music from their moments on earth, the echoes of their 'gossip in the rain's cold light'.
The Pangborn Defence, a departure from Sibum's previous verse, will be something of a surprise for those who have followed his career. Poems written as letters to personages both real and imagined, there are political undertones to many rarely seen in Sibum's ouevre. But there is still the same attention to detail, the same craftsmanship, humour, love and originality.
The most famous use of the phrase sub divo appears in Horace’s ode on patriotism, in which the poet enjoins the young to embrace the military, to suffer poverty, and, in a life of service to the nation, be sub divo (“under the sky”). In this collection of poems, however, Norm Sibum suggests that we are all of us sub divo, no matter who or what we are. Living under a sky from which there is no escape, with the “conversion of value to parody almost complete,” our poets are as likely to be fascists as they are rebels or conscientious objectors. “Shall we talk it up,” he asks his friend Foulard: “how we’re isolate / In our skins … Harps strung for satire and plunging tears?” Personal, epistolary, corrosive, vented with Sibum’s classical spleen and explosive prosody, Sub Divo delves into the “slap-happy passion” and the “colonial, scrappy, boisterous business” of American culture—while at the same time asking what future there is for a world “divided even now / In the only places where we cohere,” when “all the disparate pieces drifting in us / Pine one for the other and look / For the ceremony that will join them.”
`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.' - Harold Rhenisch - Vallum
`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.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.