"Letters From A Young Poet is full of inspiring words. Right up my alley."
Pico Iyer, author of The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto
Pico Iyer, author of The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto
"In Letters, Molyneux's commitment to writing is as obvious as his humility concerning his own talents. He has a poet's and artist's eye for what the poet Louis Macniece called the drunkenness of things being various.
Molyneux, like all writers, poets and artists serious about their spiritual and secular preoccupations, is both aware and in touch with the innocence and immediacy of candid apprehensions of the world and does justice to the wonders of existence through this exceptional literary achievement."
Mervyn Linford, author of The Beatitudes of Silence: A Spiritual Journey Through the Seasons
"Articulate and speculative, Michael Molyneux’s Letters From A Young Poet describes both an outward journey and an inward search for meaning and purpose. “Mindfulness” may be the key term that applies to this narrative in which the author travels in a more or less aimless fashion through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina; aimless, that is, in the sense that it is not driven by a timetable with specific goals.
The goal, indeed, is experience and whatever insights that brings. Mindfulness, then, is the vehicle for appreciating experience and is ultimately the key to our moral responsibility.
Molyneux is above all a moralist. He worries about the natural world, the delicate ecological balance in these South American nations, always on the brink of some irreversible development, the effect of capitalist economies on largely powerless people.
He philosophizes, too, about the poet’s role in preserving Pachamama (“mother earth,” or “mother universe,”) from the rapaciousness of greed. These are concerns that consume the author. He speculates about life, love, death, poetry, all intertwined in this process of nature, of creative evolution, to use Henri Bergson’s phrase.
Molyneux writes in the “Passing Through Peru” section:
Perhaps because of the elevation – half drunk on the thin air – my thoughts had taken on a somewhat lofty perspective. Knowing that the very same force than once aligned the constellations and set the earth in motion now ran through my blood, my veins, I thought of the others, now dead, who once walked this trail with quickened step, with coursing blood, regarding the same weather-exposed age- forgotten strata with keen senses; men who understood with their eyes each detail of the landscape. Seeing the world in this way, after some time the wind moved out of its sound and became sadder than death.
These are the ideas that motivate the inward and the outward journeys: the sublimity of the natural world and corresponding interior responses it evokes, and the resulting implications for how we should lead our lives as moral beings.
Molyneux’s free-spirited and mystical prose is dense and thoughtful and brims with intelligence and wisdom."
Charles Rammelkamp, author of Fusen Bakudan: Poems of Altruism and Tragedy in Wartime
The goal, indeed, is experience and whatever insights that brings. Mindfulness, then, is the vehicle for appreciating experience and is ultimately the key to our moral responsibility.
Molyneux is above all a moralist. He worries about the natural world, the delicate ecological balance in these South American nations, always on the brink of some irreversible development, the effect of capitalist economies on largely powerless people.
He philosophizes, too, about the poet’s role in preserving Pachamama (“mother earth,” or “mother universe,”) from the rapaciousness of greed. These are concerns that consume the author. He speculates about life, love, death, poetry, all intertwined in this process of nature, of creative evolution, to use Henri Bergson’s phrase.
Molyneux writes in the “Passing Through Peru” section:
Perhaps because of the elevation – half drunk on the thin air – my thoughts had taken on a somewhat lofty perspective. Knowing that the very same force than once aligned the constellations and set the earth in motion now ran through my blood, my veins, I thought of the others, now dead, who once walked this trail with quickened step, with coursing blood, regarding the same weather-exposed age- forgotten strata with keen senses; men who understood with their eyes each detail of the landscape. Seeing the world in this way, after some time the wind moved out of its sound and became sadder than death.
These are the ideas that motivate the inward and the outward journeys: the sublimity of the natural world and corresponding interior responses it evokes, and the resulting implications for how we should lead our lives as moral beings.
Molyneux’s free-spirited and mystical prose is dense and thoughtful and brims with intelligence and wisdom."
Charles Rammelkamp, author of Fusen Bakudan: Poems of Altruism and Tragedy in Wartime