Strongly championed by Carol Ann Duffy, Alice Oswald and John Wakeman among others. Paul Stubbs is very much a poet of the new millenium. His work reads like a report from some Beckettian post-world in the process of becoming detached from orthodox values and meanings. Stubbs's 'theological museum' is a place were dislocated fragments of traditional religion and metaphysics are put on display like broken pieces of sculpture in a museum of antiquities. A number of poems in this debut collection have 'religious' titles, but Stubbs's disturbing approach is comprhensively radical. This radicalism is evident in his rejection of conventional ideas about form and poetics - his disregard of 'anything that smacks of poetical correctness', as Alice Oswald puts it in her Foreword.To articulate his uncompromising vision, Stubbs wrestles with language, dislocating it from normal rules of grammar and syntax as though inventing a new idiom in a new age.Paul Stubbs was born in Norwich, where he now lives. He left school at sixteen and worked in various jobs around the country before starting to write. His poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and in 2002 he was one of thirty-seven British poets commissioned by the Globe Theatre in London to write a poem commemorating the bicentenary of Wordsworth's sonnet 'On Westminster Bridge'. He has written adaptations of two classical Greek plays, Euripides' The Bacchae and Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, and also a radio play, The Messiah. He is currently working on a free translation of Dante's Paradiso. Soul'...what is it my soul feels?' (Pessoa)Since your birth, I have lived here,inside of you, your internal shadow.Dreaming of the day, when (like a cripplewho runs off each leg-brace, mirac-ulously cured) I'll run off finally,the restriction of your human bones. Praying for youeach day, to quicken up in some way the process of your own life.Hoping for you, maybe, to flirta little with God, by dropping your fleshlike a dress from your shoulders;as if by doing this you might beable to swing it for me, my earlyentry into heaven. But no, nothing to do but wait;a prisoner behind flesh and bone.While sometimes I sit, hand on chin,just staring off into your within.Imagining each nerve-end, as you breathe,to be a grass-blade on some celestial plain.And, though beneath you, you can-not feel a thing. But imagine it,my form lodged within each fissureand every cleft. Where sometimesI hide, when startled, suddenly seeing myselfby accident upon the backward mirrorof your eyes. - But something at leastto relieve this inferrnal human boredom.And so this is how it goes on,day after day, myself, a mendicant:crouched down deep in your insides,a shunned form, a form un-bonedno use to your world.
The Theological Museum, by Paul StubbsThe unifying theme in Paul Stubbs’s debut collection is the quest for freedom. He uses his poems to slough off constraints, ruthlessly debunking gods and carving up bodies as he goes.Religion is reduced to a series of dusty artefacts (“the very first human rib”. “Satan’s faulty thermostat”) in the title poem’s museum. Flesh, which “restricts and prevents us”, is cast off to get to the “real flesh” inside. But what Stubbs is really trying to escape is silence. “So just how will you achieve it then, speech?” he asks, smashing up and reassembling words and syntax in an effort to solve the problem he has set. Judging from the debris of broken jaws and stopped mouths that litter his poems, he isn’t sure that he’s found the answer – and we might be inclined to agree with him. These are not easy poems, and Stubbs’s rejection of form isn’t always successful (the breaking of “mirac-//ulously” across two stanzas detracts from the other wise deft “Soul”), but there are rewards. The image of “crows sinking upward to the bottom of the sky” is one of several that stay with you. SC
Through a myriad of very powerful images is set to reconstruct theBritish idea of poetry. He uses ideas on God, on Man, like mirrorsto create an enfilade of new possible bodies right back to the eye-lens of Adam. His vision is unlike anything else around. His language like bric-a-brac left over from some lost civilizationrecreates the ontological mindscape of the reader. We witness againthe failed wounds of Christ, the clay of an icon that when crackedreveals nothing inside. But unlike poets such as the German poetGottfried Benn, or (clearly an influence) the Hungarian poet JanosPilinszky, we see a world through his poetry where the human tongueitself is still something unrevealed, still secreted inside of theupper palate of a homo sapien unable fully to manifest itself. Alice Oswald in her introduction says that these poems are 'great'and I certainly wouldn't argue with that. Paul Stubbs is tapping into subject matter that only the likes of R.S. Thomas and G.Hillbefore him have seriously touched upon. In the amazing 'HEAD 1' Weare told of one 'who abandoned / me here, somebody who must have forced me / to look up and follow / his departure into the sky.' and there is a sense of abandonment in these poems, of figures lostto a place on the borders of the universe itself: 'But either way,there is no universe / around me; / this is it, the last / place toinhabit, / anywhere.' And in the groundbreaking 'Paraphrasing the Dumb' (which T.S. Eliot winner Alice Oswald voted as her favouritepoem in Waterstones Magazine) we hear the protaganist slaver in his'mouth-pen' and who is forced to ask the question 'So then your conversation, it will continue with / who? / with what beast orcreature that will crawl in close to converse with you?' And thusin poem after poem we feel this struggle, of a voice, of a 'flesh'on the point of extinction, but the vision is undeflectible as ifeach word were mirrors themselves of mortality. Paul Stubbs has been talked about by the likes of Carol Ann Duffy as someone who isin the possession of a major talent, and for me this book confirmsthat large claim. Last word to the Irish poet Paul Maddern who recently described 'The Theological Museum' 'as a book that positions the rest of us firmly in the shade', enough said.
Bryan Howlett
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