If You Love That Lady
Maya C. Popa's third collection arrives with the quiet authority of a poet who has learned that the most intimate human dramas rarely announce themselves. If You Love That Lady takes as its central preoccupation the act of correspondence, and in doing so it opens a door onto something far larger than the exchange of letters between lovers. The book understands that writing to another person is never a simple transmission of information. It is the construction of a private world, a chamber built of language where two people can become more themselves than they might ever manage in each other's physical presence. Popa dramatizes this paradox with unusual clarity. The letter promises closeness while enforcing distance. It gives voice to feeling while burying that feeling in code, in restraint, in the careful choosing of what to reveal and what to hold back. The result is a collection that feels both historically grounded and startlingly contemporary, a meditation on longing that speaks to anyone who has ever waited for a reply that carried the weight of an entire future.
The nineteenth-century courtship letters that inform these poems give Popa a rich formal inheritance. Those letters were governed by conventions that now seem elaborate, even suffocating, and yet within their constraints ran currents of extraordinary passion. Popa recognizes that the constraint was not the enemy of feeling but its intensifier. When a suitor could not simply text a beloved or arrive unannounced at her door, every phrase carried enormous freight. A single sentence had to accomplish what a hundred casual conversations might. The poems in this collection absorb that pressure. They move with the compressed energy of writing that knows it may be read closely, reread, memorized, and eventually mourned. Popa's speakers write as if the words might be all that survives of an attachment, and this awareness lends the poems their peculiar urgency. They are documents of feeling composed under the shadow of eventual loss, which is precisely what gives them their beauty.
Desire sits at the heart of the book, and Popa refuses to sentimentalize it. In the lines from "Dark Matter," desire becomes the very condition of being alive, the thing that is wrong with a life and also the thing that makes a life worth having. The image of a sea parting to reveal another sea captures the endlessness of wanting, the way satisfaction never arrives as a final destination but only opens onto further wanting. Popa presents this not as a tragedy to be solved but as a truth to be inhabited. The command of desire renews itself, swells, and beckons, and the poet's response is neither resignation nor rebellion. It is a kind of clear-eyed surrender. To be a fool who loves until the last second is, in Popa's rendering, the only sane posture available to a person who understands what desire actually is. The poems earn this stance through their honesty about cost. Happiness was no small thing, the collection reminds us, but neither was its price, and Popa never pretends that one can have the exaltation without the wound.
The wit that runs through these poems keeps the collection from tipping into solemnity. When Popa writes of a formidable excuse, of a pair of borrowed eyes with a side of Keats, she reveals a sensibility capable of laughing at the very romanticism it takes seriously. This is a crucial part of the book's texture. The humor is not defensive, not a way of holding feeling at arm's length. It is instead a sign of intelligence keeping pace with emotion, a refusal to let longing curdle into self-pity. The borrowed eyes and the side of Keats suggest a lover assembled partly from literary tradition, someone whose appeal is bound up with the poetry that has taught generations how to describe attraction. Popa sees the joke in this and also sees its truth. People do fall in love through the language they have inherited. They do borrow the eyes of dead poets to look at the living. The wit acknowledges the artifice without dismissing the genuine feeling underneath it, and this double vision is one of the collection's signature achievements.
The geographical range of the book deepens its emotional architecture. Setting poems in America, England, and Romania, Popa creates a landscape of longing that crosses borders and inheritances. Romania in particular carries a weight of ancestry and displacement, a homeland that exists partly in memory and partly in the gap between generations. England evokes the literary tradition that shaped the courtship letters and the poetic conventions the book both honors and interrogates. America becomes the present tense, the ground on which the speaker stands while looking backward and outward. These three settings do not function as mere backdrops. They are pressures on the self, competing claims of belonging that make the question of where one is at home as fraught as the question of whom one loves. Popa maps desire onto geography and geography onto memory, so that the ache of wanting a person becomes indistinguishable from the ache of wanting a place, a past, a version of oneself that particular landscapes made possible.
Popa frames the collection as part elegy and part ars poetica, and the pairing is exact. The elegiac mode grieves the passing of impossible things, and Popa understands that some of the most painful losses are the losses of things that never quite existed, the futures imagined in letters that were never fully lived. An elegy for the impossible is a strange and daring form, because it mourns not what was taken but what was never allowed to arrive. The courtship letters that shape the book are full of such futures, promises and hopes suspended in ink, and Popa treats their unraveling as a genuine death. At the same time, the collection insists on making, on the poem as an act of remaking what has been lost. This is the ars poetica running beneath the elegy. Every poem that mourns a lost possibility also creates a new one, a made thing that exists because the lost thing did not. Popa demonstrates that writing about loss is itself a form of survival, a way of converting absence into presence, silence into speech.
The charged silences that follow correspondence receive as much attention in this book as the letters themselves. Popa is acutely aware that what goes unsaid can carry more force than what is written. The pause between letters, the reply that never comes, the sentence broken off before its meaning is complete, these silences are where the deepest feeling often lives. A letter creates an obligation and an expectation, and the silence that answers it becomes a text of its own, one that the waiting lover reads obsessively for signs of hope or dread. Popa gives these silences their due. She understands that the drama of correspondence is not only in the words exchanged but in the intervals between them, the terrible fertile quiet in which the imagination runs ahead of the facts. The poems dwell in this quiet without rushing to fill it, and the restraint mirrors the restraint of the courtship letters that inspired them. The book practices what it describes, using withholding as a form of expression.
The relationship between appetite and revelation gives the collection its philosophical spine. Popa proposes that appetite, like poetry, depends on both revelation and restraint. This is a claim about desire and a claim about art at once, and the two claims illuminate each other. A poem that revealed everything would exhaust its power, just as a desire that was fully satisfied would cease to be desire. Poetry lives in the tension between what it shows and what it conceals, in the reader's sense that more remains beneath the surface. Desire lives in the same tension. The beloved who is fully known loses some of the pull that the partly hidden beloved exerts. Popa's poems enact this principle in their form. They reveal enough to draw the reader in and withhold enough to keep the reader wanting, and this rhythm of disclosure and reticence becomes the erotic logic of the book. The reader is placed in the position of the lover awaiting a letter, given fragments and made to long for the whole.
What emerges from all this is a portrait of longing as a generative rather than merely painful force. Popa refuses the easy equation of desire with suffering, even as she never denies that desire causes suffering. The inventive, relentless drive of longing is, in her hands, the engine of self-discovery. The things that break a person open are also the things that reveal that person to themselves. This is the collection's deepest argument, made not through statement but through accumulation, poem after poem tracing how the experience of wanting exposes the wanter. A person who has never longed has never been forced to confront the shape of their own need, the contours of what they lack and what they hope to become. Popa treats longing as a kind of self-knowledge that arrives only through rupture. The breaking is not the price of the revelation. The breaking is the revelation, the necessary condition under which the self becomes visible to itself.
The technical accomplishment of the poems supports these thematic ambitions without ever calling undue attention to itself. Popa writes with a precision that feels earned rather than showy, choosing words that carry multiple meanings and arranging them so that the tension between meanings does the poem's work. Her lines have the compression of the courtship letter, the sense that nothing is wasted and everything has been weighed. The music of the poems tends toward the restrained rather than the ornate, a spoken quality that keeps the emotion grounded even at its most intense. This restraint is itself a statement. In a collection about the discipline of feeling, the discipline of the verse becomes a formal echo of the content. Popa does not flood the reader with emotion. She meters it out, controls its release, and the control makes the feeling more rather than less powerful when it finally breaks through. The craft and the subject are inseparable, each teaching the reader how to understand the other.
The collection also asks what it means to inherit a way of loving. The nineteenth-century letters are not simply source material but a legacy, a set of instructions for how attachment might be conducted. Popa's speakers stand at a distance from these instructions, unable to fully adopt them and unwilling to fully reject them. They live in the awareness that their own desires have been shaped by conventions they did not choose, by the poetry and the letters and the courtship rituals of the dead. This awareness could produce paralysis, but in Popa's hands it produces something more interesting, a self-conscious tenderness toward the tradition that formed them. The poems love the old letters even as they see their limitations, mourn the vanished world of courtship even as they recognize its constraints. This ambivalence is honest and rare. Popa neither romanticizes the past nor congratulates the present. She holds both in view, understanding that the way people love now is built on the ruins of the way people loved then.
By the time the collection reaches its close, the reader has been led through a complete emotional education. The book begins in the rush of love and moves through its fallout, tracing the full arc from exaltation to grief to the strange peace that follows. Popa does not offer consolation in any conventional sense. She offers instead the harder gift of clarity, the sense that the pain of longing has been fully understood and fully honored. The poems do not promise that love will last or that desire will be satisfied. They promise only that the experience of wanting, with all its cost, is the experience of being fully alive, and that a person who refuses to want has refused the only life available to them. This is a bracing conclusion, and Popa arrives at it without a trace of sentimentality. She has earned the right to say that one would be a fool not to love until the last second, because she has shown exactly what that love costs and exactly what it reveals.
If You Love That Lady confirms Popa as a poet of unusual range and depth, capable of holding intellectual rigor and raw feeling in the same line. The collection's engagement with correspondence gives it a distinctive angle on the ancient subject of desire, and its geographical and historical breadth keeps it from ever feeling narrow or merely personal. The wit leavens the grief, the restraint intensifies the passion, and the whole coheres into a unified meditation on what it means to want another person and, through that wanting, to discover oneself. The book takes its place in a long tradition of poetry about love while adding something genuinely new to that tradition, a sensibility shaped by displacement and inheritance and by the particular silences of the modern age. Readers who come to it looking for easy comfort will not find it. Readers who come looking for truth about the appetite that drives and breaks and remakes a life will find it in abundance, delivered with the piercing elegance that has become Popa's signature.
The lasting impression the collection leaves is of a mind refusing to look away. Popa stares directly at the paradox that desire is both what is wrong with our lives and what makes them worth living, and she does not blink. She sees that correspondence creates intimacy and enforces distance, that letters build worlds and record their collapse, that longing wounds and reveals in the same motion. The book holds all these contradictions without resolving them, because Popa understands that the contradictions are the point. A poetry that tidied them away would be a poetry that lied. What she offers instead is the truth of the divided heart, the self that wants what will cost it everything and reaches for it anyway. That reaching, rendered with such intelligence and such feeling, is the achievement of If You Love That Lady, and it is what will bring readers back to these poems long after the first encounter has ended.
