Ex Nihilo

by Paul Stubbs

Ex Nihilo is an ambitious, unusual and thought-provoking work by a poet who is not afraid of pressing poetry to its limit, and beyond. If in T.S. Eliot fragments are shored against ruin, and hence look backward for sustenance, in Paul Stubbs’s poetry, fragments are the building blocks of thinking, writing and living right now. They point towards other ways of understanding and seeing: a perception that he captures in lines like “my imagination a cave wall to the one now / chalking up its own image onto the walls”, where a fragment of Plato is reworked into something else, not just nostalgic, public-historic or ante-X, but creative, personal and potent. The chiselled fragments of Stubbs’s poetry connect to something outside the poet (history, text etc.) and then walk off into a life of their own. – Tabish Khair

Genres: Poetry

46 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2010

About the author

Paul Stubbs is the author of two poetry collections, The Theological Museum (Flambard, 2005) and The Icon Maker (Arc Publications, 2008), of a long poem, Ex Nihilo (Black Herald Press, 2010) and of various plays. The tutelary spirit of Francis Bacon hovers above each poem of his forthcoming third collection, The End of the Trial of Man (Arc Publications, 2013). His poems and reviews have appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines (The Wolf, Poetry Review, The Fiend, The Shop, The Zaporogue…). He also co-edits The Black Herald, a partly bi-lingual literary journal.