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 realizationt hat 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.