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. He proceeds with reverent disillusionment (no one and nothing let off the hook), not so much along the streets of Montreal or Washington or Rome as along an irregular tetrameter line, and then another, and then another: waves breaking on a beach; or a poet, in spite of or because of all odds, again embarking. This is not a world in which there is comfort—and yet there is comfort in the rhythms. One must learn to read them aloud (to misquote Chesterton), without ever trusting them.