A review of Paul Stubbs’s EX NIHILO by Mark Wilson on 3:AM magazine.

“The language of poetry is, and always has been, a protean creature that has developed over millennia. It is a slippery, untamed, chameleon-like creature which grows and bifurcates, shedding skins of language as it goes. Ex Nihilo embodies this evolutionary process and teems with imagery of this kind… (it is) a wild behemoth that does not play by staid, conventional rules of versifying. As is befitting for his subject-matter Stubbs invents new undisciplined forms for his language to writhe and prowl in. The ’self’ is constantly dividing into another ’self’ and its attendant doppelganger. One is reminded of Rimbaud’s ‘I is another’. As in a Cubist painting we are never quite sure who or which part of the poem is speaking to us… (it is) open-ended and in a constant state of ‘becoming’. And as the poem will never arrive at a moment of closure the language remains dynamic and supple rather than static or stagnant…”