Wow! eBook
Sub Divo
Author(s): Norm Sibum (Author)
- Publisher: Biblioasis
- Publication Date: 29 Nov. 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 112 pages
- ISBN-10: 192684596X
- ISBN-13: 9781926845968
Book Description
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 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.”
Editorial Reviews
Review
Sibum’s poems are not everyone’s cup of tea instead of breathing air they inhale the exhaust of apocalyptic times.”Books in Canada
The language, the focus on American politics and warfare, the contrarian dialogue with friends gives way, just often enough, to rage at how the century began.”Gord Sellar
Sibum has a natural gift of 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
“Sibum’s poems are not everyone’s cup of tea … instead of breathing air they inhale the exhaust of apocalyptic times.”―Books in Canada
“The language, the focus on American politics and warfare, the contrarian dialogue with friends … gives way, just often enough, to rage … at how the century began.”―Gord Sellar
“Sibum has a natural gift of 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
About the Author
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. He has published several volumes of poetry in Canada and England. A joint U.S.-Canadian citizen, Sibum currently lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.
