Ad Maiestatem (Collected Poetry of Fr David Jones) gathers more than four decades of spiritual and poetic reflection from a man who lived between cloistered silence and the restless search for divine beauty. Written from 1980 to 2024, these poems follow Fr Jones’s journey from La Trappe to Tuscany to his hermitage in Ireland, exploring how language, solitude, and faith can shape the human spirit.
In this volume, time becomes prayer and language becomes offering. Every poem feels carved from contemplation, not written in haste but refined through listening. It is a rare collection where a priest’s inner world opens gently to the reader, balancing austerity with tenderness and tradition with living breath.
The Voice That Grew Out of Silence
The life of Fr. David Jones is akin to a metaphor-he was a young Trappist, whose silence would one day develop into a voice that could speak for those who search for meaning in that stillness. After many years of monastic life, Fr. David continued as a priest and subsequently as a hermit, carrying within him a deep veneration for solitude.
There is silence in his poetry-not an absence, but a sort of music. Each line breathes with echoes of ancient prayer, monastic ritual, and the long echo of faith passing through centuries. There is no performance here, only the clear voice of a man who has spent a lifetime listening.
Where Tradition Meets the Inner World
One of the most striking qualities of Ad Maiestatem is its rootedness in heritage. Fr Jones writes through Welsh, Latin, French, and English traditions with ease, drawing on the bardic rhythms of his homeland and the cadence of sacred liturgy. His poems move from Welsh hillsides to French abbeys and Italian choirs, carrying with them a sense of pilgrimage, both geographical and spiritual.
This is not a collection that speaks of faith as concept but as experience. In his verses, prayer becomes poetry and beauty becomes a way of knowing. The reader is invited to walk slowly through each page, to pause, to absorb. As Fr Jones himself writes, “the echo of a word needs time and space in which to return and settle on the inward ear.”
Poetry as Companionship in Faith and Doubt
Though deeply spiritual, Fr Jones’s poetry never hides from human weakness. Grief, loneliness, and longing stand beside faith as equal teachers. He makes a reference to the monk who walks the streets during the night with only a candle as a companion, quite an image for any soul wanting some light to shine through.
The poem speaks about people grappling with faith as it does with the others who rest under its cloak. There is no preaching in these lines, only truth offered through experience. For readers of faith and those outside it alike, his words offer a shared place of reflection, a reminder that beauty and sorrow often speak the same language.
Finding Light Through Faith
In the preface, Dr Lucia Musi describes Fr Jones’s work as a journey along the Via Pulchritudinis, the Way of Beauty. His poems, like an oyster's secret of turning dirt to pearl, convert all their faults and pains into beauty. They surface hidden pearls of human experience, to expose the very truth of how suffering and pleasure crisscross in the same thread of being.
This path through beauty is what binds the collection together. Each poem, whether written in a cell, a chapel, or the quiet fields of Wales, becomes a small act of praise, a return of the world’s fragmented beauty to its Creator.
The Meeting Point of Prayer and Creation
The collection also raises questions about art and vocation: can contemplative life and creative expression coexist? Fr Jones’s life became a living answer to that question. Though his literary work was once seen as incompatible with monastic silence, he continued to write as a form of prayer. Scholars such as Dr James Hogg and Dom Augustin Devaux later recognized that his poems were not a distraction from his calling but its fulfilment.
Fr. Jones has tied the ancient and the contemporary in such a way that the centuries of Christian thought become instantly relevant even in the light of modern questions of identity and meaning. His work reminds us that art need not be at odds with faith; they can complete one another.
Why Ad Maiestatem Matters Now
Poems like these invites one to slow down, to listen, to breathe, in this world of noise and haste. They bring with them a very special calm and dignity almost thought forgotten. Each poem is a snapshot of stillness, not an attempt to run off somewhere else in one's mind but going back down to essentials.
In spiritual literature and sacred poetry, texts such as Ad Maiestatem answer the need for such reading. Kept and read many a time, it will follow the account of the quest for the truth by one tempted to lay an invitation to those on a similar journey.
About the Author
The priest and poet of Wales, David Jones, has traversed the silence of Trappist monasticism, pastoralism in Italy, and several years of solitude in his hermitage in Ireland, opened to him through the kindness of a good Irish bishop. He is a man of many tongues, and his homeland is recognized as one of the most radiant liturgical and classical traditions in the world; indeed, it seems to me that all he has done so far is in pursuit of beauty as a way of reaching God.
His poetry has appeared in Analecta Cartusiana and Salzburg Studies in English and American Literature, as well as in Welsh periodicals. In addition, it is studied for that quite crazy juxtaposition of faith and art.
Availability and Contact
Ad Maiestatem (Collected Poetry of Fr David Jones), Volume 1, covering the seven years and a quarter spent in the long since closed Carthusian monastery in France is published and available now in hardback and paperback through major book retailers.
Volume 2 will include the Trappist period, while Volume 3, currently being illustrated, will encompass the long period in the Italian Abbey and the later years in the Hermitage in Ireland.
For further information, review copies, or interviews with Fr David Jones, please contact: The Empire Publishers
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