It is difficult to write poetry about God, alcohol, the disenfranchised, and spiritual identity without rewriting every post-modern poetic cliché offered up over the last 50 years. Poet Norm Sibum is up to the challenge, though, and in Girls and Handsome Dogs he spins interesting poems on the big subjects, rife with imaginative symbolism, quick wit, and naked clarity of thought.

Sibum also bucks the current trend toward brief poems that read like the written equivalent of photographs. Most of the poems here are at least three pages long, allowing Sibum to develop a character or theme and then move it slowly along, stopping along the way to muse on his choice of material and place of poetry itself in day-to-day life.

In “The Inspiration,” the redheaded waitress who is “nobody’s fool” alters the poem’s rhythm and stanza length, as well as the poet’s desire to see her in different clothing – including a garter belt. Sibum’s narrator sees “waitresses [as] so-called ‘unacknowledged legislator[s]’” with “parliamentary obligations.” In the collection’s best poem, “Wife of the Lamb of the Universe,” Sibum describes a “lovely” woman whose “demeanour [is] serious” but whose youth and beauty affect the day’s rhythm.

Sibum alludes to such artists as Hugo, Baudelaire, Keats, Mozart, and many others. These are all brilliant artists who understood that the mathematics contained within traditional esthetic forms did not have to constrict idiomatic speech or sound. Although Sibum writes mostly in free verse, he understands and utilizes the arts of metre and versification to great effect.

In Girls and Handsome Dogs, Sibum attempts to address “the chaos at his core” with poetic forms that are far from ordinary, nobly asking us to “speak forever/[of] life and death, whim and art” while never closing our eyes to our surroundings.