On Norma Farber’s “Year of Reversible Loss”

Poet, concert singer, actress, novelist, and translator, the late Norma Farber was the author of thirty-five books. Her poems appeared in countless periodicals includingThe New Yorker, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. Now, nearly three decades after her death, comes her previously unpublished Year of Reversible Loss. This strictly controlled yet rhapsodic examination of the terrain of grief was occasioned by the death of Norma Farber's husband of more than forty years, medical visionary Sidney Farber. As Pulitzer-Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee writes, "More than a marriage of art and science, theirs was a marriage of two unorthodox and complex minds." Of this anguished but lyric meditation that alternates between essay and verse, former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky notes its "formal doubleness" that yields writing as "attentive as it is candid, cool as it is heartfelt, elegant as it is passionate."

I'm the third of Sidney and Norma Farber's four children. This marvelous poet's bravura language is our mother tongue. In our mother's text of grief we hear her love of Basho, Dickinson, Hopkins, the songs of Schubert and Schumann. Her invoking of their wisdom, technique, sounds. May other readers now hear the music of Norma Farber's tenacious exploration of loss, survival, and mourning, hear also her hard-won celebration of the unstoppable miracle of this ever-renewing world.