Confident in his use of Christian icons, nothing is 'sacred' to Paul Stubbs who is as prepared to write as God and Pope as he is Adam (and Eve). Using paintings by Francis Bacon as their starting points, these poems delve into baroque realms of psychological and philosophical thought, filling the unknown with urgent possibility. To each neo-operatic poem he brings wit and classical knowledge to build a singular and aesthetic passion. Yet throughout the landscape of these poems, there are reminders of the business of living with pain, desire and faith. This is not a book for the faint-hearted, but those who enter will be well rewarded, emerging with a renewed conviction of their own choices in viewing the world and our construction of it.
The Paralytic Child; The Ascetic attempts to speak; God-Body problem
(resolved?); Afterworldsmen; The Birth of the Third Reich; The priest kept
alive in public; On Route to Bethlehem; Since the Death of Yeats; The Birth
of God; Two Figures; Three; An Adam (and an Eve); The Awakening (evolution of
the pious); Pope II; The Pope departs his heaven; Evolution; The New Birth of
Man; Bandaged Figure at the Base of a Crucifixion; Study for a Portrait of
Van Gogh V; Figure in Movement, 1976; Monkey and the Atheist; Lying Figure,
1969; The Unsaved; Lost Tale from the Apocrypha; Religious man prepares for
paradise; The Apostate; The Abstract Crucifixion; Paralytic Child and the
Flood; The Three Final Phases of Perdition; Head I, 1948; Death of Utopia;
The Scream; Men on high-pulley contraptions in mid-air; The Adam
Resurrection; Elysium; The Last Days; The End of the Trial of Man; Parousia;
Biographical Note
Paul Stubbs was born in Norwich and now lives in Paris. He left school at sixteen and worked in various jobs around the country before beginning to write. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, and in 2005, he received two awards for his writing from the Society of Authors and the Arts Council of England. His debut collection, The Theological Museum appeared in 2005, and second, The Icon Maker, in 2008. He has read at various places, including the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, the King's Lynn Festival and in New York. In 2002 he was one of 37 British poets commissioned by the Globe Theatre in London to write a poem commemorating the bicentenary of Wordsworth's sonnet 'On Westminster Bridge'.
