THE 0 PRINCIPLE - RRH

The 0 Principle is not for the faint-hearted. A roller-coaster ride through the valley of the shadow of death, lifting the naughty hem of Persephone’s bridal gown, it is beat poetry grown up and surviving the ordeal of an education in magic. With the needle-pointed sorrow of Wilfred Owen and adolescence that has grown up too fast, and voluptuous imagery to rival William Burroughs at his artistic best, RRH has created a multilayered epic that surpasses both with its purity of experience. A very knowing humour flashes from time to time in the darkness of this Decameron-esque adventure.

The 0 Principle is a multi-layered soul-searing examination of the human condition with its messy omnipresent mortality and carelessly passionate loving. It is a work of honesty and brutality and glory, a salute to Death, and an homage to Love.

Presented as 26 poems, following the structure of the major arcana of the tarot with the four aces, and broken into three distinct parts, there is a woven tapestry of the inner development of a magical identity in a dreamlike subterranean world populated by clowns and gods.

The 0 Principle was written over sixteen days and has only been edited for layout, as an exercise in the application of magical techniques of ritual and channeling to the process of writing poetry, in order to sustain the creative output for longer than usual. Each poem was given its own time and space to arrive, most of which took about an hour, some which came in two or three spurts over a morning or an afternoon.

The design of the book is suggestive of themes from within the text, with space for the reader to annotate or to illustrate, most explicitly in the title pages for each poem which are laid out as empty tarot cards, to be filled by imagination as it engages with the imagery within.