Cover image: Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891),
Une saison en enfer et proses dites évangéliques, autograph manuscript (source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits).
All prices include postage.
The Carbonized Earth
a study on Arthur Rimbaud
followed by
Perfect Little Monster
a play in three acts
​
by
PAUL STUBBS
​
​
Isbn 9782919582365 – April 2024 – 204 pages – £14 / 15 €
​
​
At last, someone has the nerve and poetic enquiry to re-vision Arthur Rimbaud. The Carbonized Earth is fully illumined, able to apprehend its subject cosmologically, beyond mere personality, identity or biographical sketches. This is devotional and sophisticated poetic essay writing, moving Rimbaud through interstellar space, away from simplistic Les Poètes maudits mythology or boy wonder fanaticism. Who better to do this than Paul Stubbs, a seer seeing Rimbaud cored not so much by his own poetic language, but by his very existence. Here, among ‘imbeciles’ plugged into social realism or the aesthetics of the day, Rimbaud faces only one option: to try and outwit the horror and ‘comedy of existence’ by imagining beyond it. For this task, everything must be reinvented, and so time and notions of ‘truth’ are necessarily rearranged and deranged sensorially. As Stubbs illustrates brilliantly throughout these chapters, Rimbaud begins the poem from an ‘alphabet of zero’, radicalising literature by turning it to face what it is not. The poem is received, not merely something derived via ‘experience’, but from an echoing universe, the only place his visions could, ultimately, exist. With intimate understanding, this book confirms why, for Rimbaud, he could only really live outside and in ‘opposition to himself’ and to literature per se. This is a book grounded in philosophical integrity and perceptive imagination. Think you know your Rimbaud? Then read this and you will meet him all over again, as if for the first time.
James Byrne
​
​
‘The flint of a future poetics that slept within Rimbaud refused to ever fully ignite the fire of an all-consuming imagination, and thus extinguished too early the poet inside him; for by living an almost discontinuous existence, out of synch with the time ticking in the clocks of his contemporaries, Rimbaud forced all of his tomorrows to multiply and burst forth in a sentence, in a second genesis, that of his every new thought.’
Paul Stubbs, ‘Traversing the Horizon’ (Chapter 6)
​
Contents of the book (pdf file)
​​
​
"Stubbs works carefully and insistently to ensure that his Rimbaud does not fall into the mode of historical account from which it has become difficult to salvage him, as a literary totem of revolt. Rimbaud is instead pictured only through the sinuous movements of poetic-philosophical thought, propelled by the energy of the poet’s having ‘buried the dead’ – as a gnostic act of devotion to process – in his own gut.
Though there is indeed a formidable philosophical-theosophical knowledge interlacing and informing its account of the movements of this ‘terminal-velocity life in-and-beyond poetry’, what is most striking about The Carbonized Earth is its sense of embodiment of the journey it performs, its vivid impression of a writer having to wrestle with what he describes, in the Afterword as ‘a consistent defeat, an on-going sensation of obsolete continuum’. It’s a necessary defeat, of course, and one which marks this book as the kind of engagement with Rimbaud which his work requires and calls for – in much the same way that for instance Artaud’s work and ideas can only be understood by a dousing, by an immersion. "
​
from "Acts of Renunciation: the poet-essayist as understudy in Paul Stubbs’ The Carbonized Earth", by Stephen Sunderland, 3:AM Magazine, July 2024
​​
​
Paul Stubbs is a British poet, the author of several poetry collections published in the UK and France (The Theological Museum, The Icon Maker, The End of the Trial of Man, and The Lost Songs of Gravity) and books of poetical and philosophical essays. Visions de l’outre-monde, a selection of poems translated into French, was published by Hochroth-Paris in 2019, and another bilingual collection (An Anatomy of the Icon - Une anatomie de l’icône) was released in 2022. Poems and essays have appeared in a variety of books, magazines and anthologies. With Blandine Longre, he has translated several poets and writers into English – Victor Segalen, Arthur Rimbaud, Jos Roy, Pierre Cendors, Ernest Delahaye – as well as texts on fine arts. He has also coedited the bilingual literary magazine The Black Herald. He also wrote the introductions of various books, and received awards for his writing from the Society of Authors and Arts Council East. Forthcoming, a poetry collection (Beast, The Lost Chronicles, Broken Sleep Books, 2024) and The Acceptance of Loss, an essay on Jack Kerouac.
​
https://poetpstubbs.wixsite.com/paulstubbs
Also by Paul Stubbs
Beast, The Lost Chronicles (Broken Sleep Books, forthcoming in 2024)
An Anatomy of the Icon / Une anatomie de l'icône (poèmes traduits par Blandine Longre, 2022)
The Lost Songs of Gravity (2020)
Visions de l’outre-monde (poèmes traduits par Blandine Longre, Hochroth-Paris, 2019)
The Return to Silence, and other poetical essays (2016)
The End of the Trial of Man (Arc Publications, 2015)
Flesh (2015)
Ex Nihilo (2010)
The Icon Maker (Arc Publications, 2008)
The Theological Museum (foreword by Alice Oswald, Flambard Press, 2005)
​