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Synopsis
Noah’s epiphany I awake yet my pupils they fail to dilate; remain focused on the animals, the stern and the oars, and how alone God looks on the rudder. The poetry of Paul Stubbs presents an original and unorthodox re-evaluation of religion and human existence, powered by a visionary impulse which, in The Icon Maker, sees the principal theological players in a world ‘beyond’ religion called to account and made to face uncomfortable transformation into corporeal beings. Resolute atheist, jaded sinner, ecclesiastical man – all are the poet’s targets, and in this fine second collection, we encounter a poet working uncompromisingly with language, hounding it to keep it awake and to take on the unrefined materials of his imagination. Paul Stubbs was born in Norwich where he now lives. He left school at sixteen and worked at various jobs before beginning to write. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines including Poetry Review, Agenda and The Shop. In 2005, he received two awards for his writing from the Society of Authors and Arts Council East. His first collection, The Theological Museum, was published in 2005.
Paul Stubbs's disruptive poems definitely go off every known trodden path: fraught with paradox, saturnian-like reversals, universal questioning about death, decay, doom, cosmic and spiritual disorder, fragmentation of selves and human condition, they generate stunning images that reach heart and mind alike and that are rooted in the metaphysical but also in the concreteness of the flesh; the way the poet spontaneously subverts language triggers a constant enthusing stimulation as the recurrent synctatic ruptures produce an almost unexpected rhythmic fluidity that constantly rings true, vividly spontaneous yet cerebral and never dully trite nor mainstream at all, the least that can be said – a voice whose genuine uniqueness stands out above that of many other living poets, charged with Donnian & visionnary Blakian overtones (without mentioning Yeats, Trakl, Holderlin or Milton, among others...!) and which, as such, will undoubtedly withstand the test of time.
Blandine Longre
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