Bøger af Norm Sibum

Norm Sibum's poems are field notes from the end of empire, a satirist's barbs, verse letters from a poet to his enemies and friends.

A MILLIONS.COM MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2013A HYPOALLERGIC FALL LITERARY RELEASE TO KNOW ABOUTNorm Sibum is not everyone's cup of tea ... instead of breathing air he inhales the exhaust of apocalyptic times.Books in CanadaA place: the Traymore Rooms, downtown Montreal, an old walk-up. Those who live there and drink at the nearby caf form the heart of Traymorean society. Their number includes: Eggy, red-faced, West Virginian, a veteran of Korea; Eleanor R (not Eleanor Roosevelt); Dubois, French Canadian, optimist; Moonface, waitress-cum-Latin-scholar and sexpot inexpert; and, most recently, our hero Calhoun. A draft dodger and poetical type.For a time all is life-as-usual: Calhoun argues with Eggy and Dubois, eats Eleanors cobblers, gossips of Moonface, muses on Virgil and the current President. With the arrival of a newcomer to Traymore, however, Calhouns thoughts grow fixated and dark. He comes to believe in the reality of evil. This woman breaks no laws and she inflicts no physical harmyet for the citizens of Traymore, ex-pats and philosophers all, her presence becomes a vortex that draws them closer to the America they dread.Intelligent and frighteningly absurd, with a voice as nimble as Gasss and satire that pierces like Wallaces, The Traymore Roomsis a sustained howl against libertarianism under George W. Bush.Norm Sibum has been writing and publishing poetry for over thirty years. Born in Oberammergau in 1947, he grew up in Germany, Alaska, Utah, and Washington before moving to Vancouver in 1968. The Traymore Rooms is his first novel.

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 Horaces 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 were isolate / In our skins Harps strung for satire and plunging tears?Personal, epistolary, corrosive, vented with Sibums classical spleen and explosive prosody, Sub Divo delves into the slap-happy passion and the colonial, scrappy, boisterous business of American culturewhile 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.