
WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF THE WONDER By Maya C. Popa Review by Dustin Pickering
WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF THE WONDER By Maya C. Popa
Review by Dustin Pickering
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.
Publication Date: November 8, 2022
ISBN: 9781324076216
Pages: 96
Scripting the Symbolic
Beginning with the etymology of “wonder” from the German cognate for “wound,” Wound is the Origin of Wonder reflects on tenderness. It is a journey through metaphor into metaphysical regions of language. Maya C. Popa’s literary excursion is not as personal as much as scripting the symbolic from life. The cover presents the reader with an owl in flight and the association is later revealed in the poem “The Owl”. Popa writes, “There are ways / to fail an owl, for metaphor // to fail.” These lines suggest the owl is representative of resonant mysteries. The poem begins on this note:
“We share an owl now – we did not mean
for this to happen. It hovers
between us, a symbol and a debt, sleeps
in a country neither recognizes
until we’re face to face—then it’s familiar,
and it’s impossible not to laugh.”
The owl becomes a shared reality in flight. Time is composed of moments that pass into moments, and Popa explores this as the nature of woundedness throughout the collection. In “Year” she writes, “the hour losing / its precious light // like a night bleeding out / through a hole in the armor.” Human vulnerability is presented as a mask in the making. At its deepest and most resonant level, the aesthetic touch of life is being vulnerable through the wound. From this, we have a source of all we envision.
Three poems bear the title “Wound is the Origin of Wonder”, suggesting the thematic importance of the phrase. The last poem bearing the name reads: “What doom / to be beheld: you sing / when you should tremble.” This joyous complaint resonates with the burdens many of us face. The repetition of this title in the book creates a pattern from the presentation, perhaps to create an underlying sense of obsession. This obsession unites the reading experience as Popa writes, “… do you hear our oneness / beating at the door?” Time, through its seasonal variations, is a pondering on life, “Our appetites’ agreement / we call love, / though it was nearer the mirror / than mercy.” This shared experience between oneself and the Other is love.
Love is the experience of rejuvenation and exuberance. Such exuberance is not without failing, “Like all falls, we came at ours / by pleasure, all languages // seconded, learned by constraint – / no way to say look and away / and mean un-lone me.” Moments encapsulate moments and cannot be taken back. The poetry is introspective yet invites the reader to an understanding the poet partakes of herself. The epigraph from Emily Dickinson is telling in this regard, “We talked with each other about each other / Though neither of us spoke.” For this reader the epigraph communicates a common secret, the utmost secret concerning life and time. Though we are wounded by passing days, these are the same days that fill us with wonder. If these moments simply stayed with us we could not learn to love them, and the fact they pass so reluctantly from us is a source of wonder. “Each day I remember / Each day I strategically forgot,” Popa writes in “Pestilence,” “[…] how human / is the future / will it let us let / I am listening through my terror to yours”.
Wonder is also metaphorical. In “Dream Vision” Popa writes, “It was visions of passion I most feared,” indicating that fear is a source of passion. Passion is the crux of wonder in “The Peacocks,” where these birds “[…] cannot be conceived of fully / without blinking back a dread at splendor / so near a public waste bin, the likelihood of failure.” The peacocks signify the resonance of beauty in our lives and how we may miss an opportunity to enjoy such a moment of beauty. Birds are fleeting, symbolic of appreciating what easily passes us.
Even though these poems are not personal, there are lines such as “I want to love someone I worry / is me, though it’s just as often you / I worry I love when I mistake / the spoken for the intuited, / the ice for the fish beneath.” These lines in “Disquiet: A Taxonomy” are crafted with psychological and social observation. We measure time through a lens of Self and Other. Here, the two are intermingled in selfhood which signifies presence within absence. Language is the essence of life, “ […] I worry I’ll only have words with which / to tell the story of what mostly // occurred outside language, like a doctor treating for / the wrong ailment” Popa writes, suggesting her doubts as a poet. While poetry resembles life and shapes the ideas we have of place and being, it is not life itself. She ends the poem with lyrics from country star Willie Nelson, “Most people are dreaming / of someone else, it’s what keeps / the jukebox playing all night.” Desire is the essence of longing and from desire we craft our intuitions. Desire emerges to fill the void.
In “On the Subject of Butterflies” Popa writes, “Do they recognize / the desperation of our doing, / believing desire should end in evidence, // or after a life at ease with transformation, are they so sure they returned / to that first moment when anything // might still become of them / in fate’s commanding and indifferent hand?” This balancing act between fate and free will creates tensions which time resolves. The first stanza reminds readers that poetry can only draw inspiration from life and not fully represent it: “Trying to write about them is hopeless, / those machinations colluding with air / Turgenev compared to withered maple.” However, invoking Turgenev’s metaphor also reminds readers of the power of literary devices.
As we grapple with time and loss, grief fills our lungs yet we rejoice. The second epigraph from Eavan Boland reveals this truth, “If I defer the grief, I will diminish the gift.” Through “a hope / made void by prior hope” (“At Cutty Sark”) the poet unveils the deepest aesthetic mystery of living. Mystery is an unveiling of expectation. The penultimate poem “There Must Be A Meaning” reminds readers that “The way things are is in such a way / as to be intimated then forgotten.” Popa then writes, “It’s the way with some things too sweet / to be lived out. I’ve buried you each day / in the dirt of a life I keep tilling.” Wound is the Origin of Wonder is an intimate portrayal of the arrow of time.
Dr. Maya C. Popa is most recently the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023) and the chapbook Dear Life (Smith|Doorstop 2022), which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards (UK). Wound is the Origin of Wonder was named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry and has been featured in The Washington Post, The Irish Times, The Harvard Review, Booklist, and elsewhere. In 2021, she was commissioned by The United Nations to write a poem and deliver the opening remarks for the International Day of the Girl. Popa is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of a department bursary for exceptional merit, and previous degrees from Oxford University, NYU, and Barnard College. She is currently pursuing a graduate certificate in Diversity, Equity, and Leadership Initiatives from Harvard University.
Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, The Statesman (India), The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote, and several other publications. He was given the honor of Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace in 2022. He hosts the popular interview series World Inkers Network on YouTube. He is author of the poetry collections Salt and Sorrow, Knows No End, The Alderman, Only and Again, The Nothing Epistle, The Stone and the Square, and several others, as well as the novella Be Not Afraid of What You May Find. His most recent poetry collection is Crime of the Extraordinary published by Hawakal Publishers.
5 February 2025
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