{"id":12855,"date":"2025-02-26T19:06:22","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T18:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12855"},"modified":"2025-02-26T22:24:21","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T21:24:21","slug":"paul-stubbs-beast-the-lost-chronicles-reviewed-by-michael-lee-rattigan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12855","title":{"rendered":"Paul Stubbs, Beast: The Lost Chronicles, reviewed by Michael Lee Rattigan"},"content":{"rendered":"

A potent and challenging poetic reimagining of Yeats<\/em><\/span>‘ ‘rough beast<\/span>‘<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Paul Stubbs | Beast: The Lost Chronicles | Broken Sleep Books: \u00a3<\/strong><\/span>9.99
<\/span><\/strong>Reviewed by Michael Lee Rattigan<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018En route to Bethlehem\u2019 contains the first of many cleavings in Paul Stubbs\u2019 propulsive seventh collection, in many ways both a culmination and a confluence of this poet\u2019s singular work. Here the beast ‘slouches’ free of the apocalyptically resonant poem in which he is birthed and takes on new life in Stubbs\u2019 imagination. Note the immediate physicality of this incarnation, with the beast ‘plunging’ into the Irish sea before making a beeline for Ben Bulben ‘where one religion later, \/ we catch up with him, slumped \/ against the gravestone of Yeats \u2013 \/ horrified to be left alone\u2026’. This abject desolation and sudden realization of orphanhood is a pivotal starting point, though the beast isn\u2019t prepared to take anything lying down, intent as he is on cindering every last page of recorded text in which his own name isn\u2019t uppercased.<\/p>\n

In many poems Ted Hughes\u2019 Crow<\/em> (1970) is brought to mind, alongside European poets such as Zbigniew Herbert and his Mr Cogito <\/em>(<\/span><\/i>1974)<\/span><\/i>, as in Stubbs\u2019 poem \u2018Trying to become God\u2019. Here the beast loses no time in playing havoc with ‘God\u2019s own pre-creational cables’ in order to switch on \u2013 as he\u2019ll later switch off \u2013 ‘the first light-filaments of stars’. And, instead of Hughes\u2019 \u2018Examination at the Womb-Door\u2019, in ‘The Beast attempts to be Saved’ we are faced with a series of notes (scribbled down by God) that quite literally nail the unsalvageable nature of the beast:<\/p>\n

Any underlying symptoms of redemption to note?<\/p>\n

No\u2026<\/p>\n

Any neighbourly compassion for his fellow beasts?<\/p>\n

No\u2026<\/p>\n

Growth of a second tongue and\/or mental imbalance?<\/p>\n

No\u2026<\/p>\n

Any significant new damage to his heart tissue caused by love?<\/p>\n

No\u2026 nothing<\/p>\n

Only the six-inch retractable bones now jutting out<\/p>\n

from each paw where Christ\u2019s nails could have been.<\/p>\n

It is in such irreconcilability and desperate bafflement that these poems come into their own, just as in Crow<\/em>, though in this collection the soteriological (or salvational) dimension is at the forefront and, instead of Hughes\u2019 universalistic, even occultist tendencies, a more philosophically and theologically steeped imagination is at work.<\/p>\n

The philosophical content is here, as throughout all Stubbs\u2019 work, grist for the poetic mill \u2013 allowing for a leap through the needle\u2019s eye. This makes demands of the reader, though only in ways that this reviewer believes are urgently necessary for contemporary British poetry. Stubbs\u2019 work calls to mind Eliot\u2019s refutation of ‘little Englanders’, and Al Alvarez\u2019s attacks on the ‘terrible English’ poetic gentility, he who, in his pivotal book The New Poetry<\/em><\/span> (1961), cleared a path for poets like Hughes and Plath.<\/p>\n

The only poem in which the beast speaks for himself is ‘Extracts from The Beast\u2019s Logbook’. Here he appears as literature\u2019s ultimate shapeshifter, poised to ‘miscarry him, Yeats’ but not before the ‘miscarriage of mankind’, as glaringly stated in the logbook\u2019s 11th entry:<\/p>\n

This morning\u2026drinking the blood of men not holy enough to resist me. Using the eye-sockets of their skulls as if binoculars, seeing a mirage of myself, on the horizon, eating God. What omen is this? What hour arrives?<\/p>\n

The question of the beast’s lineage snags every nerve-end of this ‘lapsed Christ’, who begins to suspect (indeed fear) that he may be human after all. This vulnerability is reversed in the poem ‘A New Account of the Trinity’, where the three-in-one come looking for the beast to become their ‘elusive fourth part’, in order to ‘join up\u2026and make them feel whole’. Is this the wilderness in which ‘God\u2019s soul’ at the close of the poem is dragged, or somewhere else? Whatever the case, the 13th entry lays bare a desolation amid desert sands that makes even Eliot\u2019s Wasteland feel comfortable, even plush, in comparison:<\/p>\n

Half buried in the sand up ahead of me, an altar of incense, smoking. A blindman feeling for my soul in braille. His fingers bleeding. Two of the trinity bandaged and limping and refusing to meet my stare. Flies, in broken ranks, failing theologically to negotiate my shape.<\/p>\n

Such biblical mangling extends, of course, to every last character in the Bible. Elsewhere we find the beast ‘tooth-picking the last rotting entrails of angels from between his molars’, before wormhole-ejecting ‘all biblical characters to another galaxy, and a different role’. Yet the visionary reckoning of these Chronicles seems to tread on the toes of Kierkegaard\u2019s ‘Knight of Faith’, taking everything back as he does ‘on the strength of the absurd’. The beast embodies an embrace of absurdity, who, for all his inchoate thrashing, tries<\/p>\n

each epoch to regurgitate the drafts of any one document that,<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 if read might possibly have<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 stopped genocides, invasions,<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 fake cults, religious wars etc\u2026<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0might above all have stopped<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 evil hatching in the human heart<\/p>\n

So that we are able to say, by the time we reach the ‘Epilogue’, in which the beast is ‘pockmarked with the welts \/ of a world\u2019s worn words’, and where a falcon (inevitably) lands ‘on the wrong wrist’, that the poems in this collection lie in wait for the last act of faith to appear. One feels that Yeats, determined as he ever was to ‘remake’ himself, would delight in the potency of this work and what Stubbs has made of his rough beast.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Michael Lee Rattigan<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A potent and challenging poetic reimagining of Yeats‘ ‘rough beast‘ Paul Stubbs | Beast: The Lost Chronicles | Broken Sleep Books: \u00a39.99Reviewed by Michael Lee Rattigan \u2018En route to Bethlehem\u2019 contains the first of many cleavings in Paul Stubbs\u2019 propulsive seventh collection, in many ways both a culmination and a confluence of this poet\u2019s singular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nPaul Stubbs, Beast: The Lost Chronicles, reviewed by Michael Lee Rattigan - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12855\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Paul Stubbs, Beast: The Lost Chronicles, reviewed by Michael Lee Rattigan - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A potent and challenging poetic reimagining of Yeats‘ ‘rough beast‘ Paul Stubbs | Beast: The Lost Chronicles | Broken Sleep Books: \u00a39.99Reviewed by Michael Lee Rattigan \u2018En route to Bethlehem\u2019 contains the first of many cleavings in Paul Stubbs\u2019 propulsive seventh collection, in many ways both a culmination and a confluence of this poet\u2019s singular […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12855\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-02-26T18:06:22+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-02-26T21:24:21+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/beast-cover.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12855\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12855\",\"name\":\"Paul Stubbs, Beast: The Lost Chronicles, reviewed by Michael Lee Rattigan - The Manchester Review\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2025-02-26T18:06:22+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2025-02-26T21:24:21+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/e6deb0374609919f6e86f6ee1defe8cc\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12855#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12855\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12855#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Paul Stubbs, Beast: The Lost Chronicles, reviewed by Michael Lee Rattigan\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"description\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/e6deb0374609919f6e86f6ee1defe8cc\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"caption\":\"The Manchester Review\"},\"description\":\"The Manchester Review was founded in 2008 and is published by the Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester. 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