Ever since his visionary first collection, The Theological Museum (Flambard, 2005), Stubbs has illuminated one of the most uniquely searing paths in contemporary poetry. Or perhaps it is a path away from 'contemporary poetry', invoking & travelling through worlds that often seem far from what might be considered 'contemporary poetry' in service of its orphaned recreation. To read Stubbs is to encounter prophetic relics of the future - astral bones that catch unholy in the gills - and to join a kind of anti-pilgrimage; to be but nailed down in flight, and for which the struggle towards vision becomes the visionary exploration of its own impossibility. Each poem, as each book, doubles outer and inner space to wheel its blur in the estranged flesh of resurrection.
Turning entire histories of theology and thought around his own visionary interrogation in Beast: The Lost Chronicles, Paul Stubbs, it will become clear to any reader, writes unlike anyone else. Always searching and questioning, conjuring a dark astronomy of flesh while summoning rot in a timeless cathedral, Stubbs incants poetry as a seer whose otherworldly sight is not of now or then but of a timeless chaos. Courageous, and darkly comic, Beast is a mythic, desolate, and roaming testament to what poetry, in the 21st century, might still become. Lurching between a held breath and the last gasp is the slouch of that which undoes all.
- David Spittle
In this book, Paul Stubbs has achieved something new, and wonderful. In a battle far fiercer than that of Milton's angels, the mind declares war on itself-and wins.
- Peter Oswald
In this tremendous collection, Paul Stubbs borrows Yeats' figure of the 'rough beast' (from 'The Second Coming') as a protagonist to guide us through the theological ruins of Christendom.
After two millennia, the first Christ is now a cipher: a 'hologram', 'a dust cloud', 'a ventriloquist's dummy', 'a skeleton in a space suit', a mannequin, a papier-m¢ch© idol burning in flames. In his place the rough beast is making his passage through the lines of these poems, curious about philosophy, mathematics, music, the nature of evil, cosmology, evolution. The beast holds nothing sacred and sets about 'breaking open the cages' of our conceptual worlds.
Paul Stubbs creates a dazzling iconography and syntax with the power to evoke the theological wasteland after Nietzsche's death of God, where the horizons of truth and morality have been wiped away and we are 'straying through an infinite nothing'.
The beast-it is very clear-is beyond salvation. The question Stubbs leaves unspoken is what has and will become of us, in a cold and disenchanted universe, and without a god to save us.
- Hugh Rayment-Pickard
