my work is an investigation that never ends, rather than a means of resolving anything.
—Iris Murdoch, 1961
This font in the ancient church of Altarnun, Cornwall, has four monster heads on each corner; a close up colour image (by Will Stone) of one face was used for the cover of Paul Stubbs’ poetry collection ‘The Icon Maker’, published by Arc in 2008:
http://paulstubbspoet.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/the-icon-maker/
Le Drame au désert par Georges Gardet (1891)
(Source: chronide)
Flesh, by Paul Stubbs
a long poem
introduction by Ingrid Soren
Black Herald Press, 20 May 2013
130×170 – 54 pages - 10 € / £ 8.50 / $13
ISBN 978-2-919582-05-1
http://blackheraldpress.wordpress.com/books/flesh-paul-stubbs/
The forthcoming book can already be ordered here / L’ouvrage à paraître peut être commandé ici :
http://blackheraldpress.wordpress.com/buy-our-titles/
***
‘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
“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’.”
Also by Paul Stubbs
The Theological Museum, (foreword by Alice Oswald) Flambard Press, 2005
The Icon Maker, Arc Publications, 2008
Ex Nihilo, Black Herald Press 2010
The End of the Trial of Man, Arc Publications, 2013
“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.”
D.H Lawrence (Etruscan Places)
Europa and the Bull - Red-Figure Stamnos, Tarquinia Museum, circa 480 BC
Clarence Holbrook Carter
Balancing Act
1976
Edward Burne-Jones, The Depths of the Sea (1886)
Romain Verger / le 2.03.2013
In the newest issue, you’ve published poems both by interesting new writers and by the likes of W.S. Graham and Gregory Corso. Why conjure these ghosts? What are your thoughts on maintaining a dialogue between the dead and the living, a contemporaneity of different ages?
In the case of the two writers you mention above, we see them both as highly original but still somewhat neglected poets. In Graham’s case it is due in many ways to the rather superfluous and preposterous literary comparison made by English critics with Philip Larkin, which has hitherto stifled the rate of his recognition in Britain. Graham has fell victim also to what I would describe as the “terrorism” of popular taste and the Eliot-encrusted apparatus that still passes for “criticism” in England. Critical judgment in Britain is rarely, if ever, blessed by an acute linguistic abundance in which to explain itself, and thus an experimental poet like Graham has been treated in a mostly idiotic, if not off-hand way. As for Gregory Corso, there is no secret anymore of his neglect, and while there have been intermittent attempts to rectify this, we at The Black Herald want to continue to push for this “reversal.”
Paul Stubbs interviewed by Greer Mansfield, Bookslut, October 2012
