El León Literary Arts: Year of Reversible Loss, Norma Farber

Critical Praise

A posthumous memoir from longtime Monitor poet Norma Farber
After the death of her longtime husband, poet and novelist Norma Farber kept a journal in which she explored the landscape of grief. Now, almost three decades after her own passing, Year of Reversible Loss has been published, allowing fans to share that private journey. And what an unexpected journey it is. The first surprise comes from the unlikely title. Can the loss of a loved one be “reversible”?

Farber, who published more than 30 books, arrives at her answer slowly, beautifully, while weaving a seamless mix of prose and poetry. The distinctive approach reflects her changing moods and perceptions, right from the opening page. There, she announces that “last night you died” before shifting, a few lines later, to three haunting haiku:

Sign your name on the wind.
then I’ll know which way
to follow you.

How silent my body feels:
hush of my shoulders
upholding the weightlessness of loss.

A gaunt moon.
I need more light
to free the stone from its shadow.

The concentrated form allows Farber to express her feelings – and maintain some distance from them – at a time when her loss is numbingly new.
By the second page, Farber shifts her focus both outside her apartment window and inside, to a six-foot dogwood cutting she received from the complex’s gardener. The branch slowly blooms in its strange new environment, yet for Farber, who was also “pruned,” the process takes much longer.

Weeks pass as she ponders her loss through various lenses, including music, history, and mythology. In July, for example, she wonders about a woman who survived the siege and mass suicide at Masada, saying, “Take me to that cave, that close escape.” In September, she considers floods and says, through the mythical figure Pyrrha, “something fishy about survival.”
Such comments might provide catharsis, but nature is where she finds true solace, along with the growing conviction that her bond with Sidney has changed, not ended. Eight months after his passing, she writes: “Everywhere in my life I learn to know your conduit energy. You teach me – more than ever was possible while you had a name and a distinct location – to know you in natural recurrences of time and space: trees, grass, flowers, their lift and fall.”

“Conduit energy” defines Sidney’s presence in much of this thoughtful collection, and many readers will appreciate that perspective, which informs Farber’s ultimate conclusions.

Others will feel the limitations of Farber’s format— a journal—which serves the author’s needs but not always those of a reader. Perhaps that’s why Farber includes so few glimpses of Sidney and the life they shared. She, after all, seeks a reversal of loss, where “time moves so as to come back on itself.” Yet for this reviewer, the work is most compelling when Farber shows what Sidney was like as a person, spouse, or family member.
In the funniest scene, Farber recalls the time she injured her back, and Sidney, a dedicated physician, raced up to Maine to examine her himself. He left so quickly that he forgot his license and had no ID to show the police officer who pulled him over for speeding. Sidney’s solution was to show the waistband of his underwear, her audience understand why she was so determined to find some enduring connection to the man with whom she had shared her life for nearly 50 years.

—Elizabeth Lund, The Christian Science Monitor, April 16, 2012

Norma Farber's journal of the year after the death of her life's companion is in prose and verse. This formal doubleness turns out to be perfect for writing that is attentive as it is candid, cool as it is heartfelt, elegant as it is passionate.

—Robert Pinsky, Selected Poems

The music of Norma Farber’s Year of Reversible Loss is visceral, Orpheus singing the music of grief. “Let the meniscus moon hone its dagger against the sharpening dark.” Mixing brilliant essay with exquisite verse situated between haiku and pensee, Farber ignores no detail of the natural world that might ignite powerful insight. “My need is small/as the dusk under a lilac bush.“ Where Anne Morrow Lindberg and Joan Didion try for this lucidity, Farber succeeds again and again.

—Terese Svoboda, Bohemian Girl

In this rhapsodic meditation on the inevitability of the loss of the beloved, Norma Farber navigates toward the dignity that, with wisdom, she salvages with patient memory, nuanced language, and a forbearing heart. We almost feel we are witnessing her mind and hand at work as she composes herself and her book in prose and poems that combine the compassion and metaphorical flashes of Basho and Issa with the tender astringency of Dickinson. Farber grieves by testing the need both to be silent and to speak of the unspeakable. She tells herself, and us, that life, indifferent, not only continues without the beloved, it blossoms. A stoic sort of rapture is possible; longing and fulfillment embrace, in love with one another, in this rare, unforgettable book.

—Frank Stewart, Editor, Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing

We know Norma Farber as a strikingly original poet and musician, and Sidney Farber as a larger-than-life scientific and medical visionary. But they were also husband-and-wife for more than four decades. More than a marriage of art and science, theirs was a marriage of two unorthodox and complex minds. Written after Sidney Farber's death, this enthralling book is thus a journal of a partially amputated soul, with the rawness and urgency that only such amputations can bring, one of the most stirring chronicles of loss that I have encountered.

—Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies