black herald press

FLESH

a long poem

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PAUL STUBBS

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with an introduction by Ingrid Soren

Isbn 9782919582051 – 2013 – 54 pages – 10 €

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‘Stubbs is no slave to conditioning or convention: inventor as well as seer, and ignoring regulation, he stands far off looking over time and space from the perspective of an unimagined cosmology, his mastery evident as he remaps our little created world, its ideas and its faiths, with hallmark imagery.’

Ingrid Soren

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Paul Stubbs sculpts new heavens and hells from man’s now inauthentic rock of theology, pushing past both himself and infinity until reaching that ‘point in time where the flesh-tides / of all other beings collide’. Where a new logic of truth seems unavoidable, our final judgement will not happen on earth, but on another planet. So, tired of seeking both a theological and anthropological conclusion within the same body, the poet breaks down all oppositional levels of thought, whether noble and base, or good and evil, so as to devalue human hermeneutics before the process begins again of man becoming a religious argument. And this just to ensure that man is forced to feed anew upon the breadcrumbs of atoms and on a religious spirit incarnate; writing outside of both his own personality and history, Stubbs allows being, for the second time, free usage in the universe. In an audacious long poem that clearly exceeds its author and the existential riddle that in solving he hopes will ‘change Religion forever’, the poet transfers man’s biblical allusions onto an alien surface, beyond our planet’s ‘final world-carcass of catastrophe’ to a place ‘where the systems meet’ and where the poet waits to be changed ‘forever / into what I am’.

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Also by Paul Stubbs

The Carbonized Earth, a study on Arthur Rimbaud, followed by Perfect Little Monster, a play in three acts (2024)

An Anatomy of the Icon / Une anatomie de l'icône (2022)

The Lost Songs of Gravity (2020)

The Return to Silence (2017)

Ex Nihilo (2010)

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Paul Stubbs is the author of three poetry collections published in Great Britain—The Theological Museum (Flambard, 2005), The Icon Maker (Arc, 2008), and The End of the Trial of Man (Arc, 2015)—and of two long poems, Ex Nihilo and Flesh (Black Herald Press, 2010, 2013). His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, including The Bitter Oleander, The High Window, The Wolf, Poetry Review, The Shop, and the French literary magazines Les Carnets d’Eucharis, Nunc and Poésie première. He is also the author of a book of essays on Arthur Rimbaud, The Carbonized Earth. His forthcoming poetry collection, The Lost Songs of Gravity, is partly based on the religious writings of Simone Weil and other thinkers.

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https://poetpstubbs.wixsite.com/paulstubbs

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