Fr. Paul Murray is a wildly popular poet and authority on mystical Christian spirituality. His forthcoming collection of poems is, as the title suggests, inspired by the seventh-century Irish version of Saint Francis of Assisi, Moling the monk. At home in Ireland, Moling still holds the admiration and imagination of the people, and its literature continues to be captivated by his influence and legend. Before Saint Francis, the "wren, a tiny fly, and a fox" were already singing to and playfully antagonizing the Irish Moling.
Murray's poems are dedicated to Moling, thoughtfully as a fellow 'monk' and wanderer in the woods and seascapes, but also as an equally capable Irish lyricist. Murray remembers that even Seamus Heaney ascribed to the early Irish monks the ability to make "springwater music out of certain feelings in a way unmatched in any other European language." Moling is a critical element of this tradition, and Murray as a key component of its present pays tribute to him in the most appropriate fashion--verses written in the acute, observant fondness of small significant things. With Murray, the reader imbibes the fresh air of Moling's natural world and soul, a rush that is inseparably both vision and prayer: "Since, with the vain/ and with the vulgar, / God has shared his bread/ and, through the poets/ and his saints, has said: / 'To me, / nothing human is alien.'"
