The Last Decade is the culminating masterwork of this celebrated and gifted poet who was Brooklyn’s first Poet Laureate. The diversity in subject matter and style is a tribute to Norman Rosten’s earned command of the poetic vocabulary. In describing The Last Decade, Norman called the Elegy: For Hedda sequence, the center of the poems. It is the emotional pivot point and contains his wrenching exploration of the intimate bonds that continue to link Norman and his wife, Hedda, after her death. Elegy documents his painful struggle to build a life again. The earthly fabric of their symbiotic relationship is torn apart and yet a new spiritual connection begins to form between them. The Wound stuns the reader in its visceral detailing of the affair between the older poet and his new lover. The knife-edge, carnal hunger exposed in these poems reveals a love that is a composite of all the fervid emotions that came before: sexual desire, jealousy, suspicion, envy, hatred, despair, longing, surrender, loss and the unexpected reunion’s desperate lovemaking. Elegy and The Wound and the poems in the section Losses & Silence create powerful narrative tension around grief and erotic love and loss, while the Quixotic sense of humor that informs Biography of Ipsithilla and poems such as Short Poem On the Long View, as well as many in the section City/Cities, represent contrasting and refreshing balancing acts of subject and composition by the poet. Naturally enough for Brooklyn’s Poet Laureate, The Last Decade contains many poems celebrating Brooklyn and especially its eponymous bridge. ( I take great comfort from the fact that I live around the corner from the most beautiful bridge in the world. ) There are also poems that reflect the urbanness of Norman Rosten’s spirit-such as Brooklyn Handball Player and Grasshopper In Prospect Park. His well-known love of Mozart and classical music (a theme found in many poems he published in his career and reflected in his opera librettos) is here delightfully recalled in Music On the Brooklyn Barge. Bargemusic, a Brooklyn chamber music performance space that Norman tirelessly promoted, held a special memorial concert featuring selections from the many and varied musical compositions based on his poems.
