Ex Nihilo

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