Paul Stubbs Book order

The volume presents a series of interlinked reflections on the possibilities and problems of emergent forms of regional cooperation in South East Europe (SEE). Taking diverse themes such as: the economy, crime, borders, culture, and civil society, authors explore some of the facets of “open regionalism”, consisting of multi-actor, multi-level and multi-scalar processes producing a complex geometry of interlocking networks. The book situates “new regionalism” in SEE in the historical context of the legacies of Yugoslavia and the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Contemporary processes of Europeanisation in relation to SEE are also examined as complex, contingent and radically unfinished. The book seeks to move beyond the constraints of objectivist notions of regionalism as consisting of sets of relations between sovereign nation states, to address complex constructions of meaning and place.

Paul Stubbs is very much a poet of the new millenium. His work reads like a report from some Beckettian post-world in the process of becoming detached from orthodox values and meanings. Stubbs's 'theological museum' is a place were dislocated fragments of traditional religion and metaphysics are put on display like broken pieces of sculpture in a museum of antiquities. A number of poems in this debut collection have 'religious' titles, but Stubbs's disturbing approach is comprhensively radical. This radicalism is evident in his rejection of conventional ideas about form and poetics - his disregard of 'anything that smacks of poetical correctness', as Alice Oswald puts it in her Foreword.