Poetry from the UK & Ireland

Paul Stubbs

• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781908376015
• eBook ISBN: 9781910345177
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

AN ADAM (AND AN EVE)

after ‘Two Studies of a Human Body’ 1975

for John and Hilary Wakeman

“And no one knows what’s happening to him. He feels

The shadowy shapes of those who once were here,

The ancients, newly visiting the earth.”

– FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN

– At least two thousand years before

the earth was biblically complete,

the two of us,

myself and Eve,

arrived:

two ill-starred lumps in the dirt;

with, all around us,

only the papier-mâché

moulds for

the rocks

that will one

day inhabit

the earth;

for, as yet, even the sun above us

is,

in a theological sense, a mistake,

burning up centuries too early,

to char and char

at our skulls…

the both of us then:

super-celestial shapes?

yes, but growing still

impatient for a fictional and / or fricative

religion (at the speed of

the destruction of vellum)

to inform us

of just what or why we are.

(Opening our eyes onto a one-planet crime,

to endure an ageing process born of sundials,

and of a God unable to lend us horns. Us, rib-free,

in this double century

of animal and mankind; today? abandoned

inside of the no-candled lair, of a human stare…

amid the plains of flame receding,

and our still unused ancient skulls)

– But having

not yet finished reading

that scrap

of papyrus at my foot,

the muscles in my limbs

they must remain unformed,

still atrophied…

– and because the fossils

of our tongues they will

never

be

discovered

in the correct geological

time-frame,

neither of us will be allowed to

historically speak,

(no matter how doubting,

profound or prophetic our words)

no, not myself, nor

Eve sat there brooding

upon that swing

with a look upon her face that no

future skeleton

of Satan will be able to negate;

he who, in failing to replicate

evil, will succeed

in only outer-perfecting the

mind – So what will be said behind

the future-backs of theologians

that, i...

Table of contents

• Contents
• 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
• EN ROUTE TO BETHLEHEM
• SINCE THE DEATH OF YEATS
• THE BIRTH OF GOD
• TWO FIGURES, 1953
• THREE
• AN ADAM (AND AN EVE)
• THE AWAKENING (EVOLUTION OF THE PIOUS)
• POPE II, 1951
• 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, 1957
• 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
• RETURN OF THE IMAGE
• ELYSIUM
• LAST DAYS
• THE END OF THE TRIAL OF MAN
• PAROUSIA
• Biographical Note