Ex Nihilo
Ex Nihilo, a long poem
Ex Nihilo, by Paul Stubbs
Black Herald Press, 30 September 2010
120×160 – 48 pages – 8 euros
ISBN 978-2-919582-01-3
Read the reviews :
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Mark Wilson about Ex Nihilo)
Let’s get visceral… (Nigel Parke about Ex Nihilo)
The unleashment (Andrew O’Donnell about Ex Nihilo)
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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
“This is truly a masterpiece.” – Sébastien Doubinsky
”Reading Ex Nihilo is like enduring one’s own autopsy fully conscious.” – Will Stone
“Ex Nihilo re-defines the metaphysical geography of poetry itself. As a bold declaration of linguistic anthropology it announces a new beginning for British (and, indeed, World) poetry. One which is truly universal in its scope and an escape from parochialism. What we see here is a poet in full control of the rudiments of his form. Just like Valery’s potter Paul Stubbs has sifted out the gravel and shaped something truly remarkable.” – Mark Wilson in 3:AM magazine
“ Ex Nihilo is like Genesis rewritten by God. Quite extraordinary ” – John Wakeman, editor of The Shop magazine.
“Ex Nihilo, is a tour-de-force. Building on the ground of ‘The Icon Maker’, here a world of new beginning and becoming is imagined and its logics and incidentals pursued. It’s a poem about the act of creation, and the poet’s rib is the Adamic starting point for a prolonged meditation on the genesis of art, creativity and poetic consciousness.” – Nigel Parke
“Ex Nihilo seems simply to be creating it’s own rules, it’s own concerns, it’s own self and selves, and is unlike anything in British poetry right now”. – Andrew O’Donnell
