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Readers of these inspired and inspiring verses will find in their transcendent beauty and heart-warming spirituality a joy which is both human and divine, recalling the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God". Their source is age-old ritual but their spirit is that of the glorious freedom enjoyed by the sons and daughters of God. Both believers and many today who like to dissociate spirituality from a personal relationship with God may be surprised to discover their heights and depths to satisfy their most profound longings.

"Beautifully and persuasively written."
- Gus Ferguson, poet, publisher and pharmacist, Cape Town

"Authentic colloquy, simple prayer and lovely poetry"
- Professor Ian Gough, geologist and poet, Alberts, Canada

"I found the poems most uplifting."
- Rev. Dr. Gordon Bauer, priest and teacher, Bloemfontein

"Beautiful poetry. And the teaching is holy, catholic and apostolic."
- Professor Stanley Ridge, University of the Western Cape

By a singularly gracious act of Providence in January this year, a ringbound collection of some three dozen photocopied poems found its way anonymously into my pigeon hole at the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown. It bore the title "Moments of the Mass ¬thoughts of one priest" and the author was given as "James Fitzsimons SJ". The booklet gave no bibliographic detail at all: no publisher, no date, no place of publication, no ISBN, nothing - except a series of brilliantly crafted, uniquely shaped, transcendently beautiful poems of a deep and thrilling spirituality. They set my senses tingling. Whoever and wherever he was, this poet had to be tracked down.

My sleuthing Googled me first to the Southern Cross, which told me that Father James Fitzsimons, a "Johannesburg-based Jesuit", wrote a weekly column for that fine paper on matters theological and doctrinal. Through certain members of the Society and their efficient e-mail network, my search was soon at an end. But not my astonishment, for the poet, then in his eighty-sixth year, had never been published. Why did I imagine that English Jesuits, having missed Gerard Manley Hopkins's genius, would have been more alert to the possibility of further poetic brilliance in their ranks? Fitzsimons's answer raises an unintentional grin but is endearing in its humility: he felt he probably needed to mature... The hasty Protestant in me cried: "Enough!" and the end result is this collection of never before published poems, some written in Johannesburg in 2005, a few dating from 60 years earlier in post-war England, others from years and countries in between.

The first thing to strike one in reading these poems is the consummate skill in their crafting. Fitzsimons's predilection for formally structured verse manifests all the now rare features of traditional prosody: regular verse forms, metrical precision, perfect rhyme schemes, vivid imagery. Like its begetter, this poetry is under the rule of a rigorous discipline.

Fitzsimons admits to having little regard for "a good deal of so-called poetry which is not much more than pretentious prose chopped into shorter or longer lines." Yet there is here no slavish adherence to poetic convention for its own sake: in each poem the verse form selected matches the structure of the poet's thought, the choice of metres blends in with normal English syntax, unobtrusive rhymes form a natural part of the larger musical pattern in each poem, familiar images grow organically out of the themes they embody and exemplify. The structures are there, certainly, like a trellis supporting a vine, but they do not determine the nature of the plant.

True craftsmanship, in poetry as elsewhere, compels admiration, but, it is what those finely crafted poetic structures contain which most engages our attention and this is where the genius of Fitzsimons is most clearly evident. His thought and feeling, like his life, are suffused with a deep and deeply delighted awareness of God, and it is this which is the substance and the defining characteristic of his poetry. And what is more is that it is utterly unfeigned. Without cant, without entimentality, without religiosity or piousness, without the simple-mindedness which is such an irritating feature of so much "religious" verse, and without any of the dogmatism that would browbeat the unbeliever into church, these poems succeed in conveying an actual experience of the Divine immanence. That is a claim not lightly made, yet this is the experience of a convinced Protestant with no direct connection with the Roman Catholic Church and little understanding of its rituals. In these poems, as Fitzsimons himself recognises, it is the Holy Spirit who guides the poet's pen and the reader's eye.

The tone of the poetry - a glorious amalgam of wonder, humility, joy, pain, compassion, remorse - is unquestionably authentic. It is that authenticity, more than anything else, which convinces me about Fitzsimons's poetry. It speaks of the seamless fusion of feeling and thought, "felt thought", that distinguishes poetry from other forms of literary expression. Tellingly, Fitzsimons quotes Matthew Arnold:

"Genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul." It owes nothing to linguistic acrobatics or self-indulgent verbal effusions. Fitzsimons is quite clear about this: "My writing, as much as my homilies, is part of my apostolate and sharing the joy of that is what it's all about." My personal enthusiasm for these poems, my conviction that poetry such as this is too good not to share, led me to introduce some of them to several dozen friends (most of them non-Catholics, some not
even believers). Their responses matched my own. This collection is a blessing, a means of grace, a serious delight. It is fitting that 'On opening it we are reminded that it has been created Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.