Preparations for the Afterlife: Selected Poems 1992–2025 gathers more than three decades of Paul Stubbs’s work, from the Beckettian radical mindscapes of the early poems through seven collections into a long and unresolved quarrel with God, matter, and the reach of the imagination coexisting with an inner poetic terrain. This is metaphysical poetry of bone and flesh, in which a soul is agonizingly incarcerated inside the body, an icon-maker fashions new deities, a churchless Christ lies locked in planetary ice, and the only surviving human rib goes under the auction hammer. Mock-instructional poems and a museum of theological relics sit alongside a sequence of ekphrastic poems based on Francis Bacon’s paintings, cosmological meditations on the thoughts of Simone Weil, and a Yeatsian beast set loose among Aquinas, Kant, and the Trinity. Thus along the years Stubbs has developed a unique voice in contemporary poetry, in line with the visionary attempts of David Gascoyne and Arthur Rimbaud, tussling with language, dislocating it from the accepted rules of grammar and syntax. Mingling poetry and philosophy, and harbouring the same terrifying doubt as, say, a John Donne, Stubbs presents an unorthodox re-evaluation of faith and human existence.

PRAISE for Preparations for the Afterlife:

Everything about the verse is transgressive and brand-new and seemingly home-made. It’s no good tutting over its metrical or grammatical misbehaviour—you must just watch the visions and let the rules remake themselves… Stubbs is one of very few living poets whose work I go back to.

— Alice Oswald

Has a poetic voice, in recent times, been so visionary and sustained as Paul Stubbs’s? Uniquely, he writes through the veil, “channelling pre-world voice” and afterworldness, outwitting conventional poetics along the way. This Selected constellates several important collections unpublished in England until now. Written into the not-knowing silence, celebrating poetic mystery and linguistic alchemy, Stubbs tilts a mirrorbowl of images, is able to draw from an endless supply. Here, we might as easily catch Satan grinning on his sunbed as God donning his VR headgear, or track Stubbs’s own invention—a “Beast”, born out of Yeats’ tomb, “sucking on the one / biblical breath-canister / meant to be used by Christ”. Nobody dares to write this way and few delve so completely into the philosophical ideas they write about. Though his form is obviously poetry, Stubbs is also an exceptional theologian and philosopher, having read the western canon. In Preparations for the Afterlife, his remarkable vision is complete. And yet, restless towards the Kierkegaardian dream of discovering what “thought itself cannot think”, he will be already thinking outside of “clockless time”, bibliomancing over how we might “quick- canister breath, re-lung humankind / for the upcoming exertions of prayer”. I will be reading and returning to this book for years, essential as it is.

— James Byrne

Stubbs’s is a poetry complementing the paintings of Francis Bacon, the plays of Beckett and Pinter. A voice as distinctively original as the later W. S. Graham.

— Matt Simpson

ABOUT Paul Stubbs:

Paul Stubbs is a British poet, editor, and mentor who lives between Chartres & England. He is the author of several poetry collections and books of poetical and philosophical essays. His work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. With Blandine Longre, Stubbs has translated texts by Victor Segalen, Arthur Rimbaud, Jos Roy, and Pierre Cendors. He also co-founded the publishing house Black Herald Press in 2010. Forthcoming, The Disappearance of the Poet: A Study on the Writings of Alice Oswald.