HTML and CSS for a menu

To put this simply, is there any way with HTML (and preferrably CSS) to achieve an affect similar to what is shown in the screenshot attached? This was a proposed layout that was brought to me to be developed, and yet I am pretty well lost on any way to actually implement that, barring the use of absolutely-positioned divs, which I would heavily like to avoid. Similarly, I shant use tables for purposes of layout (a bit of a stickler for standards-compliance).

What I tried was floating two <p> tags left and right with some overflow trickery, but alas, that did not work. Might anyone have some insight on how to do this, if it is even possible, or realistic?

Alternately, may I instead want to ditch the things on the left side of the menu and shove them somewhere else, to avoid issues with overlap if someone alters their text size, or other unforseeable issues of that sort?

Thank you for your time.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Why, God, would you want to?

And, yes, it could be done. I'd use 0-border tables. Split the Images in half and put them next to each other to create the illusion of overlapping images. Use CSS to position the images. After that the rest is child's play.

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I can't say I'm a fan of that layout, but I second Arainach's recommendation of splitting the images in half. You don't even need CSS to do positioning

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.