A Review of Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, edited by Sarah Law

Review by Steven Knepper

Sarah Law, ed., Thin Places & Sacred Spaces: An Anthology of New Poetry. Amethyst Press, 2024.

Review by Steven Knepper

A clearing deep in the woods, an ancient cemetery, a mysterious ruin, a cathedral or what The Brothers Karamazov describes as the “old and rather poor” churches which are “the best for praying in”—there are places that seem especially charged with the sacred, places where the air seems to crackle with the numinous, “thin places” as they were called in Celtic lands. 

In her introduction to this anthology of poems about such places, Sarah Law explains that “the term…traditionally refers to a specific geographical site where the veil between heaven and earth seems thin, translucent or lifted, and thus becomes a place of concentrated grace and spiritual insight.” Law, who is also the editor of the excellent Amethyst Review, lives near the church and reconstructed cell of Julian of Norwich, and she recalls her own experiences of this site “as a much-cherished thin place where a prayerful presence is palpable, no matter the time of day, and whether the cell is unoccupied or containing visitors and pilgrims.”  The first section of the anthology is devoted to particular sites like Julian of Norwich’s church, especially those with Celtic ties. 

Still, the concept of a “thin place” seems apt beyond traditional sites of worship and prayer.  As noted above, there are places of natural beauty or sublimity.  As Marly Youmans suggested in a recent interview for NVR, there are also “thin places” of the soul: “We mortals contain thin places, both in memory and in the nature of our closeness to what is not of this world—to death’s door, to the unexplained, to the supernatural.” Sarah Law takes a similarly capacious approach in this anthology.  After the opening section on “Sacred Locations,” there are further sections on “Sacred Nature, “Sacred Architecture,” “Sacred Times & Holy Hours,” “The Thin Veil Between Life and Death,” “The Holy Unexpected,” and “Thin Places in Art, Poetry & Language.”  At nearly three hundred pages, this is a substantial anthology (and a very good value).  It ranges widely in form, including poems in both free verse and meter, and the poems reflect a variety of religious traditions.  Many of its poems, though, are relatively brief lyrics in which the speaker’s self opens up or empties or is pierced by transcendence. Among the contributors to this anthology are several poets who have also written for New Verse Review: Sarah Cahalan, Steven Searcy, David W. Landrum, Susan Delaney Spear. Some of the anthology’s poems of course impressed me more than others, but they are consistently strong.

In a brief review, I can only offer a quick look at two poems, but they will hopefully give you some sense of what awaits you in this anthology. As Law notes in her introduction, many poems could have found a home in more than one of the anthology’s sections.  Consider Genevieve Chornenki’s “The Orkney Hood,” about the Iron Age hood of a child found preserved in Scottish peat.  It is very much about a “Sacred Location” (and it is gathered in this section of the anthology), but it is also a poem of nature, of time, and of life and death.  It begins by evoking the bog as a thin place:

          Raindrops and dew overfill a lochan
          in the heather-silent bog,
          a gloaming space,
          a beckoning place
          where a dun-coloured hood enters an opening out of time
          – a child’s cowl let fall by grieving hands.

While largely a free verse poem, the dimeter and end rhymes of the second and third lines provide a meditation in miniature on “thin places,” on how the “beckoning” of the numinous, the mysterious density of the “gloaming,” transforms “space” into a “place.”

This poem, like many in the anthology, is impressive in how it so concisely evokes its “thin place.” This allows it to move quickly into its imagined narrative, the child’s hood dropped here by “grieving hands,” quite likely the hands of a parent who also sensed the sacred in this “heather-silent bog.” (The grieving is Chornenki’s imagined history of the hood, which may have simply been lost there by the child.)  From there we move to the hood’s nineteenth-century discovery when “men flaying a bank in fog-filled air / cleave its sepulchre— / light and heat and incense of heather pour out!” The alliteration of “flaying” and “fog” subtly suggest repetitive work and the sounds of cutting the peat, while “sepulchre” and “incense” blur the line between a built holy place and a natural one. 

The poem ends with the construction of the hood itself by those soon-to-be “grieving hands,” from material reused from another, perhaps a father’s, garment: “three-hundred-and-fifty catkins that once circled a chieftain’s waist, / reworked for the curls of a peedie red-head.”  These are the final two lines of the poem. The first of them, the longest of the poem, suggests the long fringe of the hood.  It also grants the poem’s final line a sense of comparative brevity that contributes to its emotional power, as our focus moves from the intricate garment to the child who wore it. 

David W. Landrum’s “Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Meteora” meditates in rhyming iambic pentameter on the monastery’s icons, which in Eastern Christianity are portals between the earthly and the heavenly. The visitor to the monastery does not really look at the icons.  The icons instead look at, or into, the visitor.  (Since the poem is written in the second person, the visitor to the monastery in some sense becomes “you,” the reader.”)  The icons speak to the visitor in the italicized lines at the heart of the poem, saying,

          Laughter, of course, and joy – but do not raise
          your voice; to do so suggests you should be
          not strolling on this rock thrust to the sky.
          Things that do not echo eternity
          are out of place here, on this mountain high
          above the earth, where all things are arranged	
          to speak of heaven and divinity.

The icons speak of, and through, the silence of reverence. 

One danger of seeking out “thin places” is a kind of spiritual tourism, of dropping in to consume a bit of the strange or the sublime.  We do not know if the visitor of Landrum’s poem is a spiritually serious pilgrim or a tourist, but either way the visitor’s intentions matter less than what the holiness of the monastery demands.  Hence, the closing lines, which convey a truth of this poem but also of many others in this collection—a truth about many thin places themselves: “Here, in this holiness, you are estranged; / here, you, not they, become the oddity.”