Traces of Myself

A NEWLY UNEARTHED TREASURE TROVE OF POETRY AND PROSE HIDDEN FROM THE WORLD FOR SIXTY YEARS. BY A YOUNG MAN WHO SAW HIMSELF (THEN) AS FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HIS ROLE MODEL ARTHUR RIMBAUD As a young man, Roy Mules quite often compared himself to the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), who stopped writing at the age of 20 and ran away to Paris to join the Franco-Prussian War. Likewise, Roy in his early twenties turned away from writing...
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A NEWLY UNEARTHED TREASURE TROVE OF POETRY AND PROSE HIDDEN FROM THE WORLD FOR SIXTY YEARS.
BY A YOUNG MAN WHO SAW HIMSELF (THEN) AS FOLLOWING
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF HIS ROLE MODEL ARTHUR RIMBAUD

As a young man, Roy Mules quite often compared himself to the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), who stopped writing at the age of 20 and ran away to Paris to join the Franco-Prussian War. Likewise, Roy in his early twenties turned away from writing poetry and, in his own words, 'got heavily involved in the May 1968 Paris student revolt'. He took up writing again later, but in quite other veins. It is clear, as can be seen in his poem Je Est Un Autre in the present book, that he left, or tried to leave, the persona of his youth behind him, yet he could not entirely escape,
And even as you are groping down my tapering veins of images,
I snail along the already drying traces of myself.

This book contains almost the whole original body of work that left those 'traces' behind. But they can hardly be called traces. Roy Mules shows in these early poems and prose works that he had an extraordinary command of the written word, a vivid and fertile imagination, and a real feeling for poetry. One feels that these are the writings of a man of assured confidence and maturity, a man of extraordinary intelligence, literary knowledge, originality and bold utterance, certainly not merely of a 'very young man' as he claims in his Introduction.
"At least they were your feelings and aspirations, not someone else's." Marion Rowse

Published by FIRST SERVANT BOOKS