Flesh

​​‘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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“Unique is a devalued term, especially in poetry. We’re drowning in unique voices, doing identical things. Paul Stubbs is the only English poet I think the term applies to. His work shows no interest in anything, except the poetic imagination. How it exists, and coexists, with his inner religious landscape. And what future his imagination can create.”

Paul Sutton, Stride Magazine

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