Confessional

A "black-belt sinner" describes her conversion to Catholicism in spiritual -- and spirited -- verse.

SINNERS WELCOME

Poems

By Mary Karr

HarperCollins. 93 pp. $22.95

If you appreciated the irreverent voice of Mary Karr's The Liars' Club , you can find it again in "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," the afterword to her fourth book of poems, Sinners Welcome . Chronicling a move from "undiluted agnosticism" to tempered Catholicism, Karr begins, "To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry -- the journal that first published some of the godless twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals -- feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO's 'Real Sex Extra.' " But poetry, with its penchant for image as well as idea, has always served as a bridge between the sacred and the mundane, so it is no surprise that Karr, a poet long before she wrote her well-known memoir, turned to her roots when life seemed to have turned its back on her. However, it took her son's desire to attend church -- "to see if God's there" -- to get Karr into the congregation.

"Like poetry," Karr writes, "prayer often begins in torment, until the intensity of language forges a shape worthy of both labels: 'true' and 'beautiful.' . . . With both prayer and poetry, we use elegance to exalt, but we also beg and grieve and tremble." She also finds essential differences: In prayer, she can enter a wordless silence where even her "sidewinding nihilism"is received with compassion. In giving thanks, she can find her fitful way toward song.

Karr clearly means for readers to encounter her statement of faith after reading the poetry, but the poems of Sinners Welcome benefit from the reader's knowing the erratic trajectory of her journey. For example, "Descending Theology" -- a five-poem sequence depicting the story of Christ, derived from exercises central to Jesuit training -- weaves itself through the 39 other poems that take up themes personal and political. The result is a provocative dialogue between the religious and the secular. Pondering the human Christ, Karr uses alliteration and internal rhyme to make her point:

You came among beasts

as one, came into our care or its lack, came crying

as we all do, because the human frame

is a crucifix, each skeletos borne a lifetime.

Religion is no palliative in Sinners Welcome . Karr calls herself a "black-belt sinner," and, by looking hard at her own human imperfections, she must painfully work her way toward spiritual and poetic grace. The poems not only confront personal deficits -- as mother, daughter, sister, wife, lover -- but also move into the imagined realm of serial killer, porn star, sweatshop worker and suicide victim. Sometimes a larger vision reminds the poet that her life, however difficult, has also been blessed. Thus, when her mother's ashes arrive "in a Ziploc bag," the speaker arrives at a universal understanding: "Love/is so rare, any such handful of ash/holds the whole world's weight."

The most moving of the poems are those in which the speaker wrestles with the emotions of letting go -- a son's departure for college, a love she "never was intended for," the untimely deaths of friends. Particularly poignant is "Elegy for a Rain Salesman" with its complex interplay of speech and silence. Such losses cause the speaker to wonder "if some less/than loving watcher//watches us," but the skepticism is mitigated by Karr's humor, her mildly ironic stance and her capacity for wry self-examination. Theology takes on a kind of earthy insight; set against an understated backdrop of persistent violence (the smoke of 9/11, the specter of Nazi Germany), the restless interchange between the devout and the degraded creates a potent synergy:

And I worry the form I'll finally take (death

lesson) and whether I can be made to leave

on anyone some mark worth bearing.

In contrast to the laid-back gusto of the final essay, the poems garner strength from compression: Nouns act as verbs, and lines perform as aphorisms ("We suffer the luxury of disbelief"). Karr's syncopated music takes some getting used to, but reading her poems aloud helps liberate their tightly packed meanings.

As Karr knows, her endeavor is ages old. It may be that all lyric poetry aspires to prayer. What gives Sinners Welcome its sharp edge is the poet's eloquently passionate struggle at the junction of doubt and devotion. ·

Judith Kitchen is the author of two books of essays and a novel. She regularly reviews poetry for the Georgia Review.