The Poetry of Praise

I don't know about you, but one of my favorite kinds of e-mail is the "your hold is in at the library" type. Got one yesterday and toddled off to my local branch to pick up Mary Karr's most recent poetry collection Sinners Welcome (it's important to remember that, in spite of her enormous success as a memoirist, Karr is first and--I think she would argue--foremost a poet). This is a rewarding collection to read, not just for the sinewy, often startling poems within, but also for the substantial afterword ("Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer) where Karr chronicles her unexpected (most of all to herself) mid-life religious conversion.

This essay sets the stage for her new memoir, Lit, which she'll be reading from next month. Take, for example, her discussion of the Czeslaw Milosz's "Late Ripeness," which she describes as "a lit-up poem of the type I aspire to write." More typically, as she admits, Karr is drawn to write, and drawn to read, darker material, and I was not surprised to see her acknowledge the bitter intensity and odd solace offered by Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Terrible Sonnets"; whether he is railing against God's remoteness or singing His immanence, Hopkins is one of the great religious poets (or maybe one of the great poets, period). The Hopkins influence can be felt in a poem like "At the Sound of the Shotgun, Leave a Message," dedicated to her friend and fellow poet Franz Wright. It gives you a good idea of how lyrically limber Karr's work is that a poem with a title like that can end with a sentence like this: "Praise // Him, whose earth is green."

When he lost his faith, around 1950, Robert Lowell expressed some regret at what he'd also lost as a poet: Catholicism had provided his work with a structure, his poems with a place to go. With poems about--either implicitly or explicitly--incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, Gardens of Gethsemane, you can see what Mary Karr gained, around 1990, with her conversion to Catholicism.

Posted on Thu, December 10, 2009 by Krupa Parikh

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