Thérèse Poems By Sarah Law

 

Thérèse

Poems By Sarah Law

Paraclete Press

www.paracletepress.com

Brewster, MA

ISBN: 978-1-64060-394-3

94 Pages

$19.00

 

Review by Dennis Daly

 

As most present-day people have slipped away from organized religion and renounced the burden of churchgoing, amid awful scandals and historic crimes, a few dedicated devotees of religiosity have surfaced, attempting to delve into the heart of the sacred matter and discern what all the fuss was about.

 

Sarah Law, a British poet, provides, perhaps, one of the deepest dives into this sensitive subject that I have come across. In her new hagiographic collection of poems entitled Therese, Law engages the life of contemplative Marie Francoise-Thérèse Martin, or, as Roman Catholics know her, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower.

 

Thérèse’s mother died when she was four years old. All four of her older sisters, Pauline, Marie, Leonie, and Celine became Carmelite nuns. Her father was, not surprisingly, a devout Catholic. None of this is particularly unusual in late nineteenth century France.

 

Everything about Thérèse, including her lifespan, was little. She briefly attended school, entered the Carmelite convent in Lisieux France at age fifteen, after initially being rejected by the local bishop, and died at age twenty-four of tuberculosis. She never travelled. Never founded a convent or reformed her order (like her earlier namesake, Saint Therese of Avila). And never accomplished anything of secular significance.

 

Yes, Thérèse lived a trivial life, but that life was not nothing. She wrote a book of memoirs, The Story of a Soul, which has never been out of print. She wrote poems. She was kind to all.

 

After Thérèse’s death, the Roman Catholic Church canonized her and dubbed her a Doctor of the Church, a puzzling title—but maybe not so much.

 

Law re-employs a vignette from Thérèse’s childhood as a metaphor to explain the seeming disconnect between Thérèse’s life and the grand insights and religious comfort drawn from it. Pauline makes a simple point about God’s grace to her younger sister, Therese, in Law’s poem, A Glass Full,

 

… how one can be full of him

 

yet smaller than a doll’s house. How

can it be fair, when some are saints,

 

but most are limited sinners?

In her hand, a white-petaled aster

 

warms and thins against her skin.

Pauline lifts a jug of water,

 

is teacher and mother, and pours

cool blessing into cup and tumbler;

 

liquid shimmers at the brim of each.

And which is fuller? Both she answers,

 

unpeeling the flower from her palm

and slipping it into the smaller vessel…

 

As a novice in the Carmelite order Thérèse had a tiff, according to her biographer Guy Gaucher, with a Jesuit priest assigned to preach at her convent. Thérèse confided to this priest her aspiration to become as great a saint as Therese of Avila and to match her legendary love of God. The shocked priest counselled Therese on her pride and presumption. But Thérèse would have none of it and argued back with scriptural arguments. This Thérèse might be little in her outlook but was no shrinking violet. Law lists many of Thérèse’s credits toward sainthood in her poem Little Carmelite. The piece, referring to Thérèse, opens thusly,

 

who took the blame for breakage

and gathered up the fragments,

 

who spun a poem from dust

and another out of night

 

who took her own short story

and wove a skein of life,

 

who knelt down in prayer until

her feet dreamt of stars;

 

who sat with the unfriended,

worked with the unloved…

 

Many of the poems in Law’s collection are based on photos (some of them included) taken of Thérèse, often in the company of other nuns. Not exactly ekphrastic, but nevertheless adding to the depth of the narrative, these descriptions delight as they unfurl the hiddenness of convent life. Dressed as Joan of Arc, Thérèse poses in one of these photos. The poet describes this photo in her piece, entitled Photo 13 Joan of Arc in Her Prison, in this way,

 

her wrists are shackled,

her head’s in her hand.

 

Therese-as-Joan-imprisoned,

awaiting her final trial,

 

her costume flammable,

her heart even more so,

 

every prayer is so much straw

strewn on the hardened earth.

 

The camera’s grace holds her

To this icon of her mission…

 

Another photographic poem by Law, Photo 17 Recreation in the Alley of the Chestnut Trees, 1895, portrays Thérèse among other nuns, who are briefly enjoying a summer’s day as they sew, draw, paint, or cut loafs of tough bread. Law notices Thérèse’s slight separation and comments,

 

Therese stands at the back,

an artist’s palette in her hand,

circling her right arm around

 

the Infant Jesus

entrusted to her care;

instinctively maternal in the midst

 

of all the older women.

Her gaze extends beyond

the photo’s edge. She’s twenty-two,

 

has two years to live,

and the whole stumbling world

to gather up and love.

 

Centered in contemplation and a simple mysticism, Thérèse’s microcosm’s littleness has, since her death, not only spread to denizens of the macrocosm or world-at-large, but inspired the seekers of personal peace, who crave that place, that moment of well-being, the still point or singularity of their soul. Law catalogs many of these seekers in her piece entitled Patron. Here is the heart of the poem,

 

those lost to faith, who

wonder how they got here:

here at the table of sinners

where there’s no wine.

 

Children,

the fallen and bruised,

the confused,

those still waiting for their mission

 

those with a burning

heart, throat, gut;

those at the fulcrum,

 

the youngest,

the smallest,

the febrile

the arid

 

the too late,

the too soon…

 

In Thérèse, Law has put together an affecting and perceptive collection that is beyond high church religiosity and more than the sum of its diminutive parts. Expect a pilgrimage into divinity’s grace, as well as the magnificent aura of poetic littleness and wonder.