If You Love That Lady
By Maya C. Popa
W.W. Norton & Co.
Early in If You Love That Lady, poet Maya C. Popa considers a Ferris wheel:
The side of a highway is no place for a Ferris wheel,
but here it is, just off the New Jersey Turnpike,
and there it goes, into the shadow of a refinery.
It’s an unintentional metaphor for the collection itself. There are several fantastic poems in If You Love That Lady. They're interspersed with ones that aren’t bad, per se, but turn away from the vivacious light of feeling and toward an abstracted erudition. You get a delight, and then feel unmoored by piles of academic references. It’s a structure that does Popa’s considerable gifts a disservice.
If You Love That Lady is a break-up book. It sings of the disintegration of a long-standing romantic and creative partnership. At its best, these poems make you feel the ache of finding and then losing a kindred spirit, someone as moved by art as you are, which is a rare thing, indeed. Take these stanzas from the excellent “I Was The Beloved”:
What a formidable excuse he was.
What a pair of borrowed eyes
with a side of Keats.
In every instance, I was the beloved,
armed with a mirror gilding
my own grievances.
In these stanzas, Popa successfully melds self-reflection, heartbreak, and her literary influences. It’s simple, elegant, and moving. However, in other poems the literary references are too loud and end up getting in the poem’s way.
If You Love That Lady draws heavy inspiration from two obscure literary sources. According to the collection’s notes section, “Several of these poems draw loosely on the nineteenth-century courtship letters of Sally McDowell, former wife of the governor of Maryland, and John Miller, a Presbyterian Minister.” The name If You Love That Lady is a shortened version of If You Love That Lady Don’t Marry Her, the title of a book by Thomas E. Buckley, S.J. that collected the letters of McDowell and Miller.
The other important historical source is the intense relationship (and correspondence) between the multi-genre writers Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. Graves is best known as the author of the historical novel I, Claudius (1934) and the book-length essay on poetics The White Goddess (1948), which was a primary influence on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Sassoon is considered one of the most important poets of WWI and is also known for his pioneering work of auto-fiction, the Sherston trilogy.
Both of these sources of inspiration are interesting, but they have little in common with each other beyond being passionate romantic relationships. McDowell and Miller were a heterosexual couple not engaged in creative work who, after a long engagement, married and lived happily for 40 years. Graves and Sassoon had a passionate affair while they convalesced from WWI, a time when homosexuality was illegal, but it wasn’t an exclusive relationship and it seems to have fizzled out shortly after the war. The two became enemies after Sassoon felt that he and his family were unfairly depicted in Graves’s 1929 autobiography Good-Bye to All That.
Popa’s poems about the two relationships are interspersed, implying a shared energy between whose nature never quite becomes clear. The introduction gestures to the “paradox of correspondence: The private worlds shaped by the act of writing, and the expectant silences that charge our lives.” What that paradox is or how the act of writing shapes one’s inner life isn’t clear. Also, if Popa and her paramour mostly corresponded by letter, that’s not evident in the text, and would also be an oddity in our century of overwhelming inter-connectivity.
I get the distinct feeling that Popa uses obscure literary allusions as a sort of buffer between her poetry and the rough surf of her emotions. I think this strategy is a mistake. Her poems are most effective when they’re at their most personal. Take this section from “London Zoo,” dedicated to Popa’s mentor, the poet and scholar Saskia Hamilton, who passed away in 2023:
evenings in your dimly-lit apartment,
time passed like the revolving fountain
in the penguin pool, its residents
marching the modernist spiral
until their yellow flippers augured arthritis.
The present: neither of us wanted much
to do with it.
This is a lovely ode to a lost friend. The language is evocative, with the kind of insistent imagery you have to slow down to savor. The reference to “the modernist spiral,” is a perfectly rendered surprise of a nod toward Hamilton’s academic focus on modernist poetry. The arthritic penguins hammer home the painful reality that all beings, even the most lively, must pass. Ironically, it’s in this poem that Popa most succinctly captures the heartache that she spends most of the collection trying to capture:
London Zoo
had been a date, neither first nor last
with a man who’d give a decade shape.
I rose and refilled your apple juice.
I love this stab of pain, its quick contemplation on how the emotional tenor of a place changes with each visit, and then the abrupt shift back toward care-taking. It’s a great contrast, as care-taking requires constant attention to the present.
I don’t want to be too harsh here. There are many terrific poems in If You Love That Lady. I look forward to see what Popa does next. I hope that, in her future works, she leans more into her heart rather than her head. That said, I’d recommend this collection to anyone who’s gone through the dissolution of a long relationship that you thought would last forever.
