The End of the Trial of Man

By Paul Stubbs

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Release date: Jul 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781910345177

Book preview

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