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Confident in his use of Christian icons, nothing is 'sacred' to Paul Stubbs who is as prepared to write as God and Pope as he is Adam (and Eve). Using paintings by Francis Bacon as their starting points, these poems delve into baroque realms of psychological and philosophical thought, filling the unknown with urgent possibility. To each neo-operatic poem he brings wit and classical knowledge to build a singular and aesthetic passion. Yet throughout the landscape of these poems, there are reminders of the business of living with pain, desire and faith. This is not a book for the faint-hearted, but those who enter will be well rewarded, emerging with a renewed conviction of their own choices in viewing the world and our construction of it.
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The End of the Trial of Man
Published by Arc Publications
Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road,
Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK
www.arcpublications.co.uk
Copyright © Paul Stubbs 2015
Design by Tony Ward
978 1908376 01 5 (pbk)
978 1910345 17 7 (ebk)
978 1908376 02 2 (hbk)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Arts Council England for a generous grant towards the completion of this collection.
Special thanks go to Eden Kane whose support existed before there were any poems to support, and to Rosa Richardson for her unconditional friendship and support. Also to the following people: the author’s parents, Blandine Longre, Michael Lee Rattigan, Mark Wilson, Anne-Sylvie Salzman, Alex Pearce, John and Hilary Wakeman, Rhiannon Shelley, Will Stone and Peter Oswald.
This collection is dedicated to the memory of the poet Matt Simpson (1936-2009) who, despite his own frequent critical bewilderment when reading these poems, was always warm and above all (the rarest thing) non-tutorial in his comments of praise.
Some of these poems appeared in the following magazines: The Bitter Oleander, The Black Herald, The Shop, Le Zaporogue, The Wolf, Les Carnets d’Eucharis and Spolia and in the anthology The Wolf: A Decade (Poems 2002-2012).
Cover image:
Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 © The Estate of Francis Bacon.
All rights reserved. DACS 2015
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.
Editor for the UK and Ireland:
John W. Clarke
The End
of the
Trial of Man
PAUL STUBBS
2015
CONTENTS
The Paralytic Child
The Ascetic Attempts to Speak
God-Body Problem (resolved?)
Afterworldsmen
The Birth of the Third Reich
The Priest Kept Alive in Public
En Route to Bethlehem
Since the Death of Yeats
The Birth of God
Two Figures, 1953
Three
An Adam (and an Eve)
The Awakening (Evolution of the Pious)
Pope II, 1951
The Pope Departs his Heaven
Evolution
The New Birth of Man
Bandaged Figure at the Base of a Crucifixion
Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh V, 1957
Figure in Movement, 1976
Monkey and the Atheist
Lying Figure, 1969
The Unsaved
Lost Tale from the Apocrypha
Religious Man Prepares for Paradise
The Apostate
The Abstract Crucifixion
Paralytic Child and the Flood
The Three Final Phases of Perdition
Head I, 1948
Death of Utopia
The Scream
Men on High-pulley Contraptions in Mid-air
The Adam Resurrection
Return of the Image
Elysium
Last Days
The End of the Trial of Man
Parousia
Biographical Note
All the paintings which are referred to in the titles of the poems are the works of Francis Bacon.
For my Blandine
“till the agony of nonspaces and
the wreckage of erasing times.”
BLANDINE LONGRE
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
W. B. YEATS, ‘The Second Coming’
“…Then, however, he saw something sitting on the pathway shaped like a man and yet hardly like a man, something unutterable.”
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
“Long after the days and the seasons,
and people and countries.”
ARTHUR RIMBAUD, Les Illuminations
THE PARALYTIC CHILD
after ‘Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours’ 1961
“Le Paralytique se leva, qui était resté couché sur le flanc, et ce fut d’un pas singulièrement assuré qu’ils le virent franchir la galerie et disparaître dans la ville, les Damnés.”
– ARTHUR RIMBAUD
– On the day when
man he fell back onto all fours
and crawled,
the seed for you was born:
two failed cells dividing in
the mud,
to produce what here, now,
today, we see here
before us:
the lone spent eel of
a child; without
explanation, world,
or tail…
crawling into and out
of yourself, as if your
creator
had removed it your backbone
like a pick
from between his teeth.
For you have been born
of all human deaths,
even, yes,
those wormeaten parts of you,
(still visible) that died,
when, in you, a religion lost its faith…
– yet half-gutted, and
partly atrophied, it
seems
as though
you have just crawled clear of heaven?
(before God he removed it
the face-mask of Darwin)
for devolution has forced
you free
of the membrane of history
– The poise and the grace and the gait
of all ancient men,
demolished
by the one
single revolution of your hip;
species after species,
by the portent
in your eye…
– So, is there perhaps some undiscovered
tribe or people,
who, in their pockets,
still guard (religiously)
a small wooden fetish
in your image?
carved perhaps in the first
few days after the passing
of sin, once,
in a church’s vault, it was
discovered:
the microfilm of a gospel
too supernatural to view?
– Yet having now
already seen
the last earth-bound creature crash
into the sea,
and the eagle grow ill
with flying, and with all
of the languages of the world now
but unwanted pulp at
the back of
your throat,
towards what new destination can
you imagine
yourself now heading?
– You, our planet’s only
anthropological first-born!
(as, in your mind, when you move,
the unused
flesh from your limbs,
it is hurled like clumps
of wet clay
onto some celestial grid,
where, unrolled again, it is stretched
back onto fresh bone…)
– So what in Nietzsche’s or Blake’s mind
prevents you
from ever again standing up?
Your body that forces every
extraneous muscle to twitch, day after
day, when as a child beast,
you crawl, crawl
out from the landscapes,
into the now abandoned churches,
temples of the world,
where your ‘presence’ explodes like
spittle onto the icon’s lips! and where
the tilt of
your head drops all known
stares to the ground…
Until on that day
when your death
it gives birth finally to our
last belated truth,
on some dusty and deserted road,
or high plateau,
where, in mournful rhetoric,
all past experiences of man
are resolved,
resolved,
and never to be mentioned
again.
THE ASCETIC ATTEMPTS TO SPEAK
after ‘Portrait of George Dyer Talking’ 1966
– Since the epoch of belief it ended
you have been sat here,
uninjured by thorns, and with theology’s
lapsed lesions beginning now to
fall from your palms;
(and with the dials on all of your
biblical breath-canisters
working now on ‘empty’)
as faith to
a lost lunar
reef returns…
While your tongue,
a syntactical stump,
it continues to de-alphabet the world and root you
always deeper into the mud of man’s mind; you, silent
and God-mauled,
passing again from atom to atom
in prayer…
yet uninterrupted for centuries, it seems,
by nothing but
the bone-bullets of your own
slow religious death…
– So what possessions, if any, are
left here about you?
only
the few torn scraps of papyrus at
your feet,
on which are written the last
words you’ve needed to say;