Barb of Fire: Twenty Poems of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity with Selected Passages from Blessed Columba Marmion OSB / Translated by Alan Bancroft

Alan Bancroft is wel known for his accomplished verse translation of, and commentary on, poems of St. Therese of Lisieux.  Here he embarks on a similar project with regard to another Camelite nun born in the late nineteenth century, Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity - Elizabeth Catez, of Dijon in Burgundy.

Familiar with the distinctive prose of Abbot Marmion, OSB - now Blessed Columba Marmion, beatified by John Paul 2 in 2000 - Alan Bancroft shows how strikingly the writings of the celebrated Benedictine and the young French Carmelite (though independently produced) interlock.

Here are new and vivid translations of the twenty poems by Elizabeth that were published in the Souvenirs soon after her death in 1906.  Accompanying each poem is a selected passage from Abbot Marmion, also newly translated.

Elizabeth Catez, beatified in 1984, love God with an astonishing intensity.  These translations - of poems mainly unpublished before in English - together with a discerning introduction present to the reader an out-of-the-ordinary person indeed.  She (like abbot Marmion) answers in a direct manner a central question facing us all; 'What is our existence for?' 

Read the review in AD2000 here.