20 Gulf Pine Catholic • February 13, 2026 Kolin authors book of poems on St. Therese of Lisieux Dr. Philip C. Kolin, Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at The University of Southern Mississippi and a parishioner of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Hattiesburg, has just published A Centenary Garland: Poems about St Therese of Lisieux, commemorating the 100th anniversary of her canonization with the Carmelite Teresian Press at Oxford, UK. Focusing on the life and legacy of this beloved saint, Kolin emphasized that each poem is rooted in the Carmelite spiritual of “The Little Way” that St. Therese fostered. Several of the poems turn to her family; her parents “birthed children into holiness” sending four of their daughters, including Therese at 15, to the Carmelite Monastery at Lisieux, including Pauline, who became the prioress and urged Therese to write her autobiography The Story of a Soul; and Celine, whose “boxwood camera” provided “a photo album of a future saint’s hidden life inside Carmel’s walls.” Kolin includes a number of Celine’s photos. But the majority of Kolin’s poems explore Therese’s life first as a novice “elated that she now has escaped into Christ’s arms in the battle for souls doing small things with busy stillness.” Then as sacristan “who touched the elements that heaven itself would bless”; and “Singing in the Choir,” writing poems and plays, and nursing an elderly nun who bequeaths her “a glistening tear” from her deathbed. In “The Great Laundry Day” Kolin finds “an allegory of the body and the soul” as the sisters “wash heavy habits stitched with vows” that they purify with “sorrel and ash” as they “mortify their souls.” Key poems also honor Therese as the patron of missionaries, WW I soldiers seeking her protection as “the Jeanne d’Arc of Lisieux,” and those stricken with tuberculosis whose “language was blood.” Above all, Kolin stressed, the poems present St. Therese as Christ’s bride in union with Him -- “Therese in Christ; Christ in Therese.” Centenary Garland has won high praise. Father Clement, OCD, editor of the Carmelite Beacon, applauded Kolin for “his remarkable insight and tenderness . . . with the careful eye of a poet.” Paul Mariani, literary biographer and former poetry editor of America Magazine declared that after reading Garland “you will come away changed in ways you did not think possible.” Sarah Law, editor of Amethyst, pointed out Kolin was “inspired to write these beautifully lucid poems, many of them icons.” Centenary Garland is available through the Carmelite Book Service: www.carmelitebooks.com. This is the cover of “A Centenary Garland: Poems about St. Therese of Lisieux” by Dr. Philip C. Kolin, Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at The University of Southern Mississippi.
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