Roger Rosenblatt mourns in 'Kayak Morning'

KAYAK MORNING: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats, by Roger Rosenblatt. Ecco, 146 pp., $13.99 paper.

'Kayaking is like writing, requiring the same precision and restraint," observes Roger Rosenblatt in his slender new book, "Kayak Morning." You are definite, stabbing the paddle blades into the water. Wild swings will get you nowhere. Writing requires generosity toward every point of view. Kayaking insists on all points of view."

And yet, Rosenblatt -- writer, journalist and English professor at Stony Brook University -- has written a generous book full of wild swings and mad stabbings. He takes to the water in his kayak, 2 1 / 2 years after his daughter Amy's death at 38 from an undetected anomalous right coronary artery. Each day in the summer he spends hours out, beginning on Penniman's Creek, near Quogue, continuing on the Quogue Canal, toward Shinnecock Bay and Peconic Bay.

Just months after Amy's death, submerged in grief, Rosenblatt wrote an essay for The New Yorker. Then he published a book, "Making Toast." "It was therapy," he explains in "Kayak Morning." "As long as I was writing about Amy, I could keep her alive." "What about afterwards?" a friend asks. "When the book was finished, it was as if she had died again," he says.

There is no cure for grief. Is this a message that can be delivered, much less absorbed? Rosenblatt throws everything he's got at his grief, his longing for his daughter. He tries words: "They do not help. Old words, or new, now, they do not help. I had believed otherwise. If you could say it, or write it, if you could give shape and expression to it, clarity and precision to it, then something good would come." He tries to lose himself in the daily kayaking, in meditations on water. He tries unraveling language and meaning, but he is a writer -- he has spent his life making meaning.

Small comfort, no comfort, but the writing here is beautiful: "A neap tide settles like a defeat. The sky is a blue stripe, squeezed between two wide layers of white clouds. Over the canal it turns gunmetal gray. Elegies of water. Could rain."

Amy's death has ripped some hazy layer off the surface of meaning. His vision is sharp, almost too sharp -- wild and clear. Rosenblatt inhabits a glaring new land in this book. Sometimes, it is too honest, too sad. Sometimes it is too beautiful. We ride in his wake. But the reader cannot follow the writer all the way through his perilous channels, down dangerous arteries. It's not the kind of narrative, tightly controlled, in which the writer knows that salvation or perdition wait at the end of the story. He does not know how the story ends. All he knows is love and pain, moving in circles. He quotes a dictionary definition: "Grief. The state of mind brought about when love, having lost to death, learns to breathe beside it. See also love."