In Perpetuum
Paper back book, 296 pages.
In Perpetuum: The poetic journal of a Welsh Monk (and) Musings in a medieval cloister 1995-2000
From the back cover:
‘Beauty will save the world’—Dostoevskij
What beauty? That which Fr David Jones’ poetry offers us. A man who knows the voice of silence, having lived at La Trappe, where silence makes the most intimate cords vibrate. A monk who knows the sufferings of man, because his heart came out of La Trappe wide open to take in and console—as few know how to do—those wounds that deeply hurt, but also to share and keep those touches of sublime and secret nobility that Humanity at times is capable of giving. A man who knows how to draw from the treasury of tradition (Welsh, English, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Italian) things both old and new.
Here is one of the poems — A Second Baptism (p. 65):
O Master, let me come and die at last / And on this altar bleed: this is the deed /That deadens every doubt, for here I cast / My anchor for all time, and this I read / On this high stone is shown to gazing eyes / That we see not, for angels here will land / To witness to this pledge, and in the skies / A copy of this writ will ever stand. / O Love of hidden pulling! I know ill / The shape of this long morrow, but I hold / The Hand that ever held it. Here I will, / I troth, I will my trothed God enfold, / And do no more upon this Calvary / Than let it happen, let it, let it be. (Last evening of retreat).
