Preface to The Lost Box of Eyes by Fiona Sampson is to be re-printed in the Selected Poems 2000 - 2025.

 Here is Fiona Sampson's Preface. 

Preface

Alan Stubbs writes like no-one else. That’s a hugely important thing to say

about a poet. Yet for the poet himself, it can feel like a mixed blessing to

be “out there”, “on a limb”, at the waney edge of practice itself; for all the

world like this book’s exiled ‘Ovid at the water’. Another way to say this

is that a poet like Stubbs has to have enormous artistic courage. To the

quotidian terror of the blank page, he must add the vertiginous realization

that every new poem requires from him nothing less than a complete

reinvention of poetic form.

This is not to suggest that Stubbs’s darkly narrative book is a Macedonian

salad of styles and projects. On the contrary: a deep coherence underlies

the work. Images and register recur and, in recurring, speak at angles to

themselves. A consistently angry, inelegant and anti-elegant imaginary is

at work here, with equal detail, on both the inhabited local world and

dystopian fantasy, relationship and place, language and image.

Stubbs’s ever-expanding verse often has a motor of narrative, but it is also

impelled by urgent tone and by frequently risky thought-experiment. There

is curiosity, too, and an energetically appropriative take on the world,

particularly the world this book’s “narrator” travels to. ‘Ithaca’ may be

imagined or real, but Florence, in ‘in Firenze art’, is embodied in the marble

of Michelangelo’s David, while a Turkish coastline from Nazim Hikmet’s

work is reconstructed in ‘On the days’. The Lost Box of Eyes takes us to New

York, Havana, Prague and Madrid, and its cosmopolitan sophistication is a

useful rejoinder to the reader who assumes that the passionate concentration

with which other poems detail English birds and trees is a sign of a local

imagination: of some latter-day John Clare, single-handedly modernizing

English verse.

It is no such sign. Yet Stubbs is like Clare in the stubborn courage of his

unique poetics; and in its rootedness in a vividly re-rendered materiality.

These “nature” poems are hyper-real; as absolutely contemporary as any

urban anecdote. And these thought experiments repeat no single theory,

but place everything comfortable and comforting from musical formal

tropes to the so-readily-digested argumentation of lyric conventions in

question.

When I first came across Alan Stubbs’s work, among the submissions to a

magazine, I was reading tens of thousands of unsolicited poems a year. I

was punch-drunk with the repeated strategies and repetitive ideas that

dominated and still dominate if not British verse as a whole, then the whole

middle ground of that verse. I was, as any committed reader of verse must

be, frequently bored by the riskless, irreproachable poetry I so often found

arranged on the page before me. Alan Stubbs’s poetry, by contrast, came

searing off the page: restless, energetic, uncomfortable and discomforting,

like a call to poetic arms. And so it does today.

Fiona Sampson

Coleshill, 12th February, 2016

 

Fiona Sampson.

Fiona has been shortlisted twice for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes.  Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and awarded a Cholmondeley Award, the Newdigate Prize and the Ziaten Prsten (Macedonia) among others.  A Fellow and Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature, she is Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton and is the Editor of Poem magazine.