In The Return to Silence, Paul Stubbs' first collection of poetical essays, we find him tussling with Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Hölderlin, Simone Weil, Yves Bonnefoy, Arthur Rimbaud, and E. M. Cioran, thinkers and writers whose own struggles with silence evoke the very silence this author seeks himself to return to. Whether for the mystic, the philosopher or the poet, silence is life's most inescapable accompaniment and, by virtue of what speaks most deeply of the ineffable presence of the soul, its purest. Thus each of these essays re-directs the reader beyond despair or hope, to reach an eschatological prolepsis, an anticipation of a life lived always on the extreme though invisible edge of the world; that is while thinking always against the contemporary thought of the day. And as such in each essay we find, after the demise of the idea of burdensome selfhood, Kierkegaard's 'single individual', he or she who is forced, in every century, to arrive at the most absurd and paradoxical stage of life when, having passed fearlessly into the unknown, and at the cost of their own personal discipleship, they are isolated in the presence of God and, perhaps as an eternal consequence, become even more of an independent force in this world.
Paul Stubbs sculpts new heavens and hells from man's now inauthentic rock of theology, pushing past both himself and infinity until reachin that "point in time where the flesh-tides/of all other beings collide". Where a new logic of truth seems unavoidable, our final judgement will not happen on earth, but an another planet. So, tired of seeking both a theolohical and anthropoligical conclusion within the same body, the poet breaks down all oppositional levels of thought, whether noble and base, or good and evil, so as to devalue human hermeneutics before the process begins again of man becoming a religious argument. And this just to ensure that man is forced to feed anew apon the breadcrumbs of atoms and on a religious spirit incarnate ; writing outside of both his own personality and history, Stubbs allows being, for the second tome, free usage in the universe. 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 wjere the poet waits to be changed "forever/into what I am".
& dedans quantité de soleils?JOS ROY?ouvrage bilingue - bilingual book(poème français, avec sa traduction en anglais par Blandine Longre et Paul Stubbs)?Au coeur de ce poème, Vincent Van Gogh. Autour de lui gravitent lumières insaisissables, formes enchevêtrées, couleurs éclatées, soleils impossibles. Au moyen d'un langage de chair, pur et résolu, Jos Roy ré-imagine une quête intérieure pétrie de tant d'obsessions que la voix de Vincent en devient presque réfractaire aux mots. Se déploie ainsi le portrait d'un être-artiste qui, devenu couleur, déconstruit et observe le réel pour tenter de mieux le réordonner et peindre : à l'image de son âme parfois balbutiante, entre errance et lutte, et de son oeil visionnaire.?
« Nous voilà dans une sphère où la religion ne fonctionne plus, un monde de papes bredouillants, de scientifiques et de philosophes fourvoyés, où les dernières reliques de l'occupation humaine sur Terre sont mises aux enchères, où le faiseur d'icônes, un descendant du sculpteur Phidias, attend la mort du prochain dieu, le dernier de tous. Ce recueil est un scénario de fin du monde à la Cormac McCarthy poussé plus loin encore, avec le cosmos en toile de fond. Stubbs est un poète extrêmement original et singulier, l'un de ceux dont il faut écouter la voix. »
