'One of very few living poets whose work I come back to.' (Alice Oswald)
Strongly championed by Carol Ann Duffy, Alice Oswald and John Wakeman among others, Paul Stubbs is very much a poet of the new millennium. His work reads like a report from some Beckettian post-world in the process of becoming detached from orthodox values and meanings. Stubbs's 'theological museum' is a place where dislocated fragments of traditional religion and metaphysics are collected and put on display like broken pieces of sculpture in a museum of antiquities. A number of poems in this debut collection have 'religious' titles, but Stubbs's disturbing approach is comprehensively radical. This radicalism is evident in his rejection of conventional ideas about form and poetics - his disregard of 'anything that smacks of poetical correctness', as Alice Oswald puts it in her Foreword.
To articulate his uncompromising vision, Stubbs wrestles with language, dislocating it from normal rules of grammar and syntax as though inventing a new idiom for a new age.
'Stubbs uses his poems to slough off constraints, ruthlessly debunking gods and carving up bodies as he goes.' — Sarah Crown, The Guardian, Saturday 8 October 2005.
The Theological Museum costs £7.00 and was published in April 2005.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-70-4
The Theological Museum costs £7.50 and has ISBN 1-873226-70-5. It was published in April 2005.
Paul Stubbs was born in Norwich, where he now lives. He left school at sixteen and worked in various jobs around the country before starting to write. His poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and in 2002 he was one of thirty-seven British poets commissioned by the Globe Theatre in London to write a poem commemorating the bicentenary of Wordsworth's sonnet On Westminster Bridge. He has written adaptations of two classical Greek plays, Euripides' The Bacchae and Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, and also a radio play, The Messiah. He is currently working on a free translation of Dante's Paradiso.
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