Kayak Morning; reflections on love, grief, and small boats

New York: ECCO [An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers], 2012. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. [8], 146, [4] pages. Signed by author on title page. Front and back cover have flaps. Signed by author sticker on front cover. Roger Rosenblatt (born 1940) is an American writer. He was a long-time essayist for Time magazine and PBS NewsHour. He writes books, and is the Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University. Roger Rosenblatt began writing professionally in his mid-30s, when he became literary editor and a columnist for The New Republic. Before that, he taught at Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. In 1965-66 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland. At age 25, he became the director of Harvard's freshman writing department. At age 28, he held the Briggs-Copeland appointment in the teaching of writing. Before turning solely to literary work, he was a columnist on The Washington Post, during which time Washingtonian Magazine named him Best Columnist in Washington, and an essayist for the NewsHour on PBS. With Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, he created the first essays ever done on television. In 1979 he became an essayist for Time magazine, a post that he held on and off until 2006. "Kayak Morning" was written more than two years after Amy's death. This account describes the author in solitude, in his kayak in the mornings. He is heavily burdened by the continuing pain of his daughter's death, and the restless wandering of his thoughts as he paddles makes him seem at times distracted, at times anguished, at times enraged. The words are set down with a spare clarity that has no sentimentality to it but is nonetheless heartbreaking. Rosenblatt has always used words economically. His writing is candid, honest, brilliant, widely praised. Alone in his kayak, however, he finds none of this useful. Words themselves are not useful. "They do not help," he writes. "Old words, or new, now, they do not help. I had believed otherwise." The words do not help, and yet there they are, inevitable and revealing. Reading this book, one moves with the writer's words across the water in the morning with the tides and the seabirds and the sky, and has the sense that words hold this man's thoughts the way the kayak holds the man himself, but just barely. His daughter is dead; everything in his life is precarious.