The poems in My Beautiful Ruins are steeped like a soothing tea in timelessness, mysticism, twilight states, and the ebb and flow of a soul moving freely between the provinces of the visible and the unseen worlds. At times the tea becomes dark and bitter, shamanic, surreal, cruel and fragmented like the underground currents of our psyche. Poets who follow the reverie of the soul’s calling must surrender to the interior descent into wounding, brokenness and domains absent of light. This is the only path into integration, awakening and luminous bliss.
In his poetic form, Craig Lennon expresses the deepest and most vulnerable aspects growing from a boy to an individuating person. From the spiritual aspect of paradox, the father wound produces longing and depth, thus the beautiful ruins. His poetry invites us to both Celtic melancholy and the beauty beneath our experiences. Reading this book touches the soul. –Don Bisson is a Jungian-oriented, Christian spiritual director.
In this graceful, beautiful collection, Craig Lennon has crafted a series of elegant elegies, not only for the dead, but for us the still living. Reading it is a journey, and we are fuller for it. His readers will no doubt cherish this wonderful work. –Phillip X. Levine is the Poetry Editor of Chronogram Magazine.
Craig Lennon’s poetry is personal, lyrical, demanding, and hopeful. It invites the reader to enter a world that is filled with loss and abuse, but is also creative, healing and full of awe. –Jack Rathschmidt, Ph.D. is a Capuchin Franciscan Friar who has traveled all over the world preaching and teaching. He is and the author of Doorways to Holiness from Paulust Press.
This is a very personal writing by Craig Ciaran Lennon. It is intense, therapeutic, even cathartic, rich with imagery from the Irish spiritual tradition. St. Ciaran of Clonmacnoise is clearly a central heroic figure of deep inspiration. –Dara Molloy is a Celtic priest living on the Aran Island of Inis Mor off the west coast of Ireland. He is and the author of Legends in the Landscape and The Globalization of God: Celtic Spiritual Nemesis.
