“I can’t undo all I have done to myself, / what I have let an appetite for love do to me.” So opens the staggering latest collection of Maya C. Popa’s poetry, eloquently titled Wound is the Origin of Wonder. Such an opening couplet would suggest a poem of betrayal or unrequited love, but rather Popa’s wounds, her great love affair, stems from a Whitman-esque scope with the world itself in “Dear Life”: “its’ beauties / and its injuries.” The poems are timeless–that is, they seamlessly travel up and down a timeline into the memories steeped in color of childhood scenes; starlings over a penitentiary; backseat lovemaking; perpetual goodbyes; transcontinental travels; and an unnamed pestilence that explores the quiet interiority of monotony against worldwide terror.
Yet, the beauty and bravery of Popa’s work, her gentle urgency and profound declarations of love, loss, and longing, resonate in the insistent hopefulness on which her poems ultimately land. Throughout the collection a tension emerges between what lasts and what doesn’t—like the ever-changing nature, toward which Popa turns an attentive, reverent eye. Popa’s gravitational pull towards joy, in the celebration of a shared owl with her long-distance lover, or the unsung heroine in Noah’s flood, Popa’s generous spotlight on hope and revelry in such moments acknowledges the privilege that comes with pain: to feel, to experience richly in love and beauty, one must open up one’s heart and mind to a beautiful world that can and will wound us. She refuses to live passively in such a world, yet intelligently acknowledges the cost of deliberate participation. In the poem “Duress,” which subtly alludes to the recent pandemic, the speaker, long accustomed to bleaching her lemons and gazing at a world reduced now to a magnolia-filled window, suddenly remembers
… it was joy once that stopped breath,
complicated joy—it wasn’t easy
as all that.
She operates on the hinge in “Wound Is the Origin of Wonder”—“between this life / and the imagined one”—which suggests an interesting state of existence: do we gain some sort of security being in limbo, the reprieve from a trajectory that ultimately ends? Popa’s speaker assumes this watchful, waiting posture in other poems: she fixes a long observant gaze at the sea, at the cow eating in the pasture in “Prayer”—“without notion of infinity / and stars”—at the death of a bee which she openly grieves. She wanders through cemeteries and recalls the rampant desire for her lover. “Hurry,” she pleads in “Margravine,” “while we aren’t dried up rivers,” recalling the crazed race of Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time,” or Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool.” Popa’s poems consider the human response to its mortality. She alludes to Gilgamesh, to Proust, and the meaning we assign to leaving legacies, to the measures the world took to survival in the midst of a global disease. With ecclesiastical undertones, the speaker bears witness to such efforts. She notes the hapless energy and constant isolation in “Everyone Is Having an Island Vacation”: “There was a time to be afraid and to outlive, / unaccounted seconds in their coats of chance. / Now everyone is lined in spasms of hereness.” In her indictment against the industrial shift, which she pairs with the unceremonious push into the toil of adulthood in “In the Museum of Childhood,” she notes:
… There was a time
to be apart and still a part
of something human
before the usual forfeiture
This is the speaker’s own dilemma. She lives deeply, deliberately, yet in her constant travels, the landscape and location changes, but the ending of all things is constant, wherever she goes. In “Year,” she confesses:
I wouldn’t be who I am
if I could bear the foliage,
the hour losing
its precious light
Contrasting the completeness of many of her titles— “Wound is the Origin of Wonder,” “There Must be a Meaning,” “The Present Speaks of Past Pain”—Maya C. Popa does not offer a complete answer to the question of suffering in the midst and cause of impermanence. The anthem of love to life in spite of its endings resounds in the poems while not diminishing the strife that is a constant presence. Popa attends the event of living. With gratitude she marvels at the gift of the past in “In the Museum of Childhood”—“You could weep / for all you did not know then / was a blessing …” and with courageous hope that sings in retrospection of recent and past sufferings, she declares:
… I lug youth’s
icons inside me and believe
we bear that loss we caused
by our arriving. We were never
loved by anything
the way tomorrow loved us then.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder, by Maya C. Popa. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, November 2022. 96 pages. 26.95, hardcover.
Shannon Nakai is a poet and reviewer whose work appears in The Cincinnati Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Cortland Review, The Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. She works with the immigration services team of the International Rescue Committee, empowering migrants and asylum seekers in the United States. Find her on shannonnakai.com.
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