THE LOST SONGS OF GRAVITY

After The End of the Trial of Man (2015), in which Paul Stubbs sought to go beyond the imagination with poems based on the paintings of Francis Bacon, this new collection is the search for a planet-less, more elusive deity. In each poem, a new protagonist is forced to struggle with the age-old finite choice of God or no-God, but also with the outcome of that decision causing (potentially) the loss of gravity itself. Thus we encounter poems attempting to reach the theological and philosophical limit of cognition, as Paul Stubbs tussles with and questions the ideas of various thinkers (Simone Weil, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Duns Scotus, Kant, among others): amid the anthropological and epistemological possibilities of transcending the human condition and our world, the poet seeks to locate a later phase of mankind (if not a new version of it) preparing to wait eternally “for the first true church / to fall from the clouds”.