Summary
First published: New York: HarperCollins, 2006
Genre(s): Poetry
Subgenre(s): Autobiography; lyric poetry; narrative poetry
Core issue(s): Coming of age or teen life; Jesus Christ; love; prayer; redemption; sin and sinners; suffering
Overview
Mary Karr’s poems in her collection Sinners Welcome approach their often deeply personal or biblical subjects from a clear, contemporary Christian perspective. Although her poems show occasional quibbling with official Catholic doctrine and use a casual and sometimes irreverent language toward biblical themes, Karr decisively sees herself as a Catholic poet.
The story of Karr’s conversion to Catholicism at age forty is rendered in the title poem “Sinners Welcome.” As the author writes in her essay “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer,” which is included as afterword to her poems, the phrase comes from a banner hung over the entrance of Saint Lucy’s Catholic Church in Syracuse, New York, where Karr embraced her new faith. It is in this church that the persona of the title poem opens her heart to Jesus’ love.
Before the clearly autobiographical persona’s conversion and even after, many poems in the collection tell of her spiritual agonies when faced with the sadness, chaos, violence, and tragedy of contemporary human life. Throughout these poems, the spiritual despair of the persona is expressed with great emotion and with lyrics of personal directness. Yet there is always the insistence, even if sometimes very subtle, that Jesus has provided an answer to human despondency. “Disgraceland” tells of the persona’s four decades of rejecting Jesus who nevertheless “always stood/ to one side with a glass of water” while she was suffering, but she admits that she “swatted” him away for a long time.
Interspersed throughout Sinners Welcome, there is a series of five poems called “Descending Theology” that tell of the birth, life, betrayal, passion, and resurrection of Jesus. Derived from the author’s meditations along Jesuit precepts, the five poems retell key biblical stories with lyrics built on a modern combination of naturalism and spiritualism. Here, the voice of the persona is casual and sometimes irreverent, but her trust that the biblical message is still true in the contemporary world comes across as completely genuine.
Many of Karr’s poems deal with the persona’s attempt to reconcile herself, to a great part out of Christian charity, with her deceased, highly idiosyncratic mother, who was an atheist artist. In “Pathetic Fallacy,” like some related poems, the persona uses irony and sarcasm to describe the irrefutable fact that she can no longer communicate normally with her dead mother, who has been cremated. Yet on a spiritual level, she can still feel her mother’s guardian presence. Other poems forgive the mother for once having planned to abort her unborn daughter (“Coat Hanger Bent into Halo”) or to have almost attacked her with a knife when she was five. In the later instance, told in “Overdue Pardon for Mother with Knife,” the persona praises God who stopped her mother’s hand before she struck her terrified child.
Subject of another cycle of interspersed poems is the persona’s relationship with her son, who has grown up from a helpless baby to a college-bound teenager. In “Son’s Room,” the persona tells how the very dependency of her baby boy saved her from losing herself in a drunken stupor, subtly alluding to the power of the infant Jesus.
In “Pluck,” the persona observes with obvious irony how her responsibility for her young boy in the midst of financial distress moved her closer to God:
I developed pluck—a trait much praised in Puritan texts,which favor the spiritual claritysuffering brings.Dryly the persona continues on how she rejected the...
(This entire section contains 1489 words.)
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clamor of the materialistic world. When creditors called to dun her, she put the receiver next to her son’s caged crickets, treating the caller to their song.
“Entering the Kingdom” tells of how, at the end of his adolescence, the persona’s son is free to find God on his own. The poem delineates the limit of human guidance when it comes to personal spirituality and accepts the inevitability of children becoming people independent of their parents.
In Sinners Welcome, poems dedicated to friends of the author often deal with loss, suffering, disappointment, and death. Karr’s poetic voice is both stark in telling of the dark side of life, yet also full of saving irony and obstinate irreverence. Most important is the poet’s Christian view that seeks to put sadness and tragedy into larger perspective. “Metaphysique du Mal” chronicles the pain the persona feels on the cancer death of her friend, the fifth friend to die within five years. There is nothing more to do for her than to accept the mystery of death and embrace the life that is going on. This is symbolized by the steady ticking of the persona’s wristwatch, resembling both the beat of her heart and God’s enduring love.
There are a few poems that deal with violent strangers whose crimes appear to show their distance from God. Yet even for the person who murdered his father at sixteen, the persona feels hope that in jail he will find compassion for another living thing. Were this wish of the persona to come true, she feels, the murderer would be able to disencumber his heart and find his way to his divine creator’s love. It is this belief in the universal power of God’s love that deeply unifies the Christian poems of Sinners Welcome.
Christian Themes
In Karr’s Sinners Welcome, there is a strong focus on the redemption that the love of Jesus Christ offers to those who accept him into their lives. The poems dealing with the persona before her conversion to Catholicism depict misery and despair but always hint that Jesus is ready to save those willing to be saved by him. Sadness, tragedy, and nihilism are not the only alternatives contemporary Western life has to offer, the poet suggests. Christianity is a powerful and life-saving option. This theme runs throughout her poetry.
In this vein, the title poem celebrates the persona’s submission to Jesus as a key event. Religious conversion is told in highly personal as well as biblical terms. As the persona opens her shirt to show Jesus her burning heart that his love has ignited, she feels taken up by him like the proverbial lamb of Christian symbolism. Yet “Sinners Welcome” further widens its frame of reference by likening Jesus to the unlikely figure of Ulysses of Greek mythology. Like Ulysses finally coming home to Greece, the persona marvels at Christ’s arrival in her own world. Out of her union with Jesus, she feels joy germinating from the seed of her newfound faith.
A strong theme is the poet’s Jesuit-inspired meditation on the life of Jesus. This is told in the five poems of the “Descending Theology” cycle. Here, Karr combines naturalism with biblical spiritualism. There is the starkly realistic description of Mary experiencing the pains of childbirth and her baby boy tasting the first drops of her milk. Later, Christ’s death on the cross is described medically correctly as resulting from lung collapse. Yet the poems also highlight the biblical significance of each event. In Mary’s womb, Jesus is seen as already bearing the full burden of humanity’s sin. His resurrection is celebrated as a return from death. The final poem of the cycle likens Jesus’ abundant love for each human to the breaking of water at birth, ushering in new life, just as, according to the Christian faith, baptism brings humans the promise of eternal life.
Other themes of Karr’s wide-ranging Christian poetry include the coming of age of the persona’s son who has to find his own way to God, the universality of human suffering that can be ameliorated by the acceptance of Christian faith, and the persona’s own plucky relationship with Jesus. Throughout, the poems of Sinners Welcome express the poet’s firm belief in the truth of Christian salvation.
Sources for Further Study
- The Atlantic Monthly 294, no. 4 (November, 2004): 129.
- Cunneen, Sally. “Mary Karr: Sharing the Shock of Reality.” National Catholic Reporter 42, no. 42 (September 29, 2006): 18-19. Substantial discussion of the importance of poetry and Christianity in Karr’s life; analyzes some of the poems in Sinners Welcome and provides biographical background based on a personal interview with Karr.
- Musgrove, Laurence. “Sinners Welcome.” Christianity and Literature 55, no. 4 (Summer, 2006): 618-621. Discusses relationship of the book cover’s neon cross with its contemporary religious content, offers intelligent analysis of key poems, and reflects on Karr’s concluding essay.
- The New York Times Book Review 155 (April 30, 2006): 17.
- Publishers Weekly 252, no. 50 (December 19, 2005): 42.
- Ratner, Rochelle. “Karr, Mary. Sinners Welcome.” Review of Sinners Welcome. Library Journal 131, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 122-123. Concise review focusing on the violence apparent in some of Karr’s poems. Briefly places the book in the context of spiritual poetry in English.
