Among Other Howls in the Storm

Nora Drutz was a Toronto-based freelance writer.

Norm Sibum was born in Oberammergau, Germany, in 1947. After living in the U.S. for a time, he came to Vancouver in 1968, where he presently drives a cab and writes. Among Other Howls in the Storm is his fifth book of verse.

This is a slim volume of 26 poems. A drawing of a delicate rose on the cover, a motif repeated at intervals throughout the text, suggests the genteel poetry of a quiet spinster, writing of her garden and her long-lost loves. But the strong words of the book’s title lead the reader to expect something stronger, and indeed he gets it. Norm Sibum is a poet of the present. His setting is the cafes, buses, crowded streets, broken hearts, unemployment, and alienation of the modern city. He is at his best in bold stark lines such as the following: “We’re a tough species / in North America, / cruising in our t-shirts /in Vancouver, / …We watch the dollar sink, / everything else / rise like a balloon / ‘I tried to get work,’ / says still another man / breathing on me for a cigarette, / as the sun mounts a patch of grass / and passes from the white face /of the butchershop. / So bring out the history of inflation / and dress up like your favorite victims — / My own eyes /begin to have the look / of a rumpled blanket.” He uses strong original imagery to reinforce this sense of urban chaos. “In groves of metal / men hang onto coffeebreaks, / ... Dance, as if the booze were sweet / and laundry could be wrung for drops of it, / ... The clouds come apart like meat.”

He sometimes loses himself in imagery that is banal and diffuse, thus taking away from the emotional impact of his words. It is disconcerting for the reader to be immersed in a strong, well-worded, concrete visual experience, and to suddenly be flung into a banal surrealism with lines such as “I enter / the procession / of darkness familiar as sleep ... The gardens we imagined, / the flawless submission to despair or delight, / had bones heaped outside their gates. / ... Bones stretched from the garden to the city gates. / This city we abide / is erected from flesh-eating stone.”

By the way, the binding of the book is very fragile, and falls apart at the first reading.