Norm Sibum. The Pangborn Defence. Emeryville. Biblioasis Books. 2008. ISBN: 978-897231-52-4. $17.95 (paper)
The image on the cover is of a mason jar labeled “Poems.” Inside the jar is a menacing photo of Black Hawk helicopters swooping low over a meadow and a small herd of sheep. The photo is repeated twice, as a full page at the front and back of the book. We’re in metaphoric country for sure, with plenty of low-flying politics and plenty of room for speculation. Are the helicopters about to massacre the oblivious sheep? Are we the sheep? Are we the Black Hawks swooping down? Is this an image of contemporary life – terror and violence mingled with hum-drum docility?
Norm Sibum’s The Pangborn Defence is a series of poems addressed to various people or entities with whom the speaker argues, reminisces, commiserates, muses, and otherwise engages in spirited discourse. This semi-epistolary form comes out of a long tradition made fresh in Sibum’s hands by his contemporary diction and topics, and by the undeniable energy, intelligence, and frankness of the poems. The book is a meditative rant, full of fire and play yanked up short by dead-seriousness.
We’re all hosers here, right from the opening “Salvo”:
Quote me, you hosers, the notion that life
Can’t defeat the wise man, the one who’s prepared,
And I’ll respond in the negative and bring
Chaos theory through your doors.
Like hosers everywhere, many of the people in the poems (and we by extension?) are stupid, bumbling, deluded, occasionally loveable, often ridiculous, ultimately disappointed, as in the fine long poem, “Lunar Cycle”, which speaks of:
The world – how it operates, how it goads
One into believing one counts as if there were
Only one of one and not one among six billion hosers
Blushing, simpering, awaiting the fairytale kiss
of deliverance….
A great strength of this book is that it takes on big issues. Sibum also moves in the dodgy but important poetic territory of politics in the context of the personal, and vice versa. In “Lunar Cycle,” we get a startling, contemporary image of political and spiritual ill health: “And all the world shall dance to America’s tunes, / A caricature of God / fattening on its heart.” In “Answering Crow,” which contains an explicit nod to Ted Hughes’s book, Crow, but is answering much more than that, too, the speaker veers from the overtly political ( “…homicidal zealouts no world can afford/ Caress the console to which we’re wired” ) to a more complex personal/political tangle:
What’s so much more to the point than an alias,
Moniker, epithet, term of endearment, nexus
For all that’s good and brave and true in the face
Of all that’s wrong, than our voices pitched low among
The zinnias and lilies, peonies, marigolds,
Are the shadows now creeping into the realm
From a place where the sun has no purchase.
The link between the personal and the political can be murder to forge in poems without becoming either didactic or simplistic. Sibum avoids those easy outs. The price sometimes is that the connection can be obscure. Parts of this book are difficult, at times impenetrable. The reader sometimes feels on the outside of a lively but private conversation. We don’t ever really know who these people are, though we get glimmers of their relationships. In any case, the energy of Sibum’s line and insistence on everyday living carry the day. The fragmentary quality in the poems mirrors contemporary life:
Lunar, we’ve long since passed the point
When body, heart, mind and soul
Had anything like true relations,
Each of those items a revival tent
in which fake miracles occur.
I’d better be careful here. In one poem, the speaker describes “critics” as “hairsplitting fools.” Fair warning, made fairer still by the fact that the poet turns a sharp eye on his own work:
“Neither rebel nor late night comic, borrower from and lender to/Poetry’s petty cashbox, it seems I’ve taken up bingo….”
In fact, he has taken up much more than bingo, unless we’re talking about the great bingo game of life.
The Pangborn Defence contains many more voices, threads, insights, and moods than this review can describe. It is a rich collection by a poet of range and intellect who has a large body of work going back many years. It surprises by moving suddenly from small scene to broad landscape and back again, sometimes within a line or two. It can be erudite, with lofty language and cadence, or it can be snappy, with jokey vernacular. It can be tough or tender.
This book, which was nominated for the 2009 A.M. Klein Prize of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, has been described as a departure from Sibum’s earlier work, primarily because of its political content. It seems more like an energetic evolution than a departure. The poems risk using a looser narrative and imagery. The leaps are larger. They allow for intriguing, if sometimes difficult, connections. They allow the poet to explore complexities that challenge without drowning us in the ponderous.
The Pangborn Defence has great life in it. Despite “Dreaming the bad dreams of the cornered intellect,” the poet exhorts: “Come on, Lunar, and we’ll do the streets, / Raucous music in our ears.”
David Cavanagh is author of The Middleman and Falling Body, both books published by Salmon Poetry of Ireland. Born and raised in Montreal, he now lives in Burlington, Vermont.
