This collection of one hundred short poems is inspired by the life of Carmelite nun Thérèse of Lisieux, who died in 1897 aged just 24. In her elegant introduction to the poems, Sarah Law explains how this project came about. During her time in the monastery at Lisieux, Thérèse wrote a great number of letters, to her parents and three sisters, but also to a Jesuit priest called Père Almire Pichon, who acted as Thérèse’s spiritual director throughout her life. She once declared that her whole soul was in the later letters she sent to Père Pichon. When Thérèse died, however, Père Pichon made the decision to destroy all her letters and not a single one survives.

This loss sparked Law’s imagination and, although she states that these poems are not an attempt to replace those lost letters, she does say that the concept of lost letters opened up in her a space for creative reflection.

The poems themselves are very short. They are generally made up of five couplets, but there are occasional prosey pieces and/or pieces of flash fiction. Some of the poems are lists of everyday things, some are accounts of her dreams, or visions, others are wonderings of what is happening in other, sometimes alternative, lives. Popping up at regular intervals, there are also poems that begin with the same line: “Here are my sins, Mon Père”. These are Thérèse’s confessions.

Each poem is what I call a ‘psychic snapshot’, a moment of consciousness captured in a split second. One of the reasons I am drawn so much to this collection is that I use psychic snapshots of actors, artists, musicians, saints, priests, ballerinas, vagabonds in my own work. By writing through someone else’s consciousness, we may draw ourselves closer to them, in the hope of partly sharing their point of view, their vision of the world. But, of course, we can no more enter the mind of another than we can ever ‘know’ God. The ineffable is an idea for which no presentation is possible. In the meantime, presented as a body of work, these beautiful poems provide us with a rich spiritual portrait in a hundred tiny pieces, which is plenty for now.

This Transfigured Chapel of the Threads, Sarah Law, Resource Publications, £11

Richard Skinner has published seven books of poems, the most recent of which is White Noise Machine (Salt, 2023). His collaboration with fellow walker-poet Jean Atkin, entitled Crossing Paths, is out in 2026. Richard is director of the fiction programme at Faber Academy. He also runs a small press, Vanguard Editions, and is the current editor of 14 magazine