by Rupert M Loydell & H. L. Hix
A book of Recuperative Theology: playful, irreverent and
searching poems about faith, doubt and the world in between
Amethyst Press is delighted to announce the publication of Reframing the Something of God, a new collaborative collection by the poets Rupert M Loydell and H. L. Hix. Written across the Atlantic, between Cornwall and the Rocky Mountains, the book proposes a laid-back and restorative approach to faith, Recuperative Theology, complete with its own scriptures, creed, catechism, epistles, saints and dictionary.
Witty and often unexpectedly moving, these poems borrow the forms of religious devotion to ask what belief might look like for people who are doubtful, distracted and in need of a lie-down. The result is a book that is as much about language and how we make and remake meaning as it is about God.
Recuperative Theology begins, appropriately, with a found text: a column of words salvaged from the margin of a review and ‘recuperated for service as first scripture’. From there the collection builds its own sacred library. There are Recuperative Beatitudes (‘Blessed are the sick / for they will recuperate’), doxologies to the Great Recuperator, a creed of irony and collage, and two Epistles to the Apathians urging the faithful to lie low, put their feet up and recover. A question-and-answer Catechism, prepared under the auspices of PROPP (Poets Recuperated Only Partially and Provisionally), sits alongside the scattered fragments of the Devoran Old Quay Scrolls, discovered on a village green and translated by scholars in the local pub.
Beneath the comedy runs a serious current. Loydell and Hix write about uncertainty, damage and healing, about loss and the costs of recovery, and the stubborn persistence of wonder. Lives of improbable saints, a chant, a revelation ‘as told to John the Reclined’ and a closing Dictionary of Recuperative Theology, where entries on kenosis, depravity and the bowhead whale sit side by side, make this a book to read cover to cover or dip into like a breviary.
The collection is introduced by a Foreword from the elusive Archbishop Makeshift, who commends its ‘documents of recuperative theology’ to readers everywhere.
‘There are different answers to most questions and here are some of them.’
– Archbishop Makeshift, from the Foreword
Reframing the Something of God is available as a paperback or Kindle book from Amazon here.
Amethyst Press’ website is here.
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