A STEINWAY ON THE BEACH

A series of short, linked meditations from a life winding down.

After a successful outing deploying a similar structure to illuminate a similar theme in Cold Moon, Rosenblatt returns to an emptier well, here focusing his attention on the idea of wound as blessing. One of the things that made the previous book come to life was an abundance of childhood stories, but such engaging memoir material is mostly absent here. One of the only passages of this type offers the author’s recollections of ducking into his father’s office on the way to a tennis match; he’d cut his thumb opening the tennis ball can and relied on Dad to stitch it up. “My father, born poor, who had struggled his way up to a dignified medical practice, in high school holding three jobs at once, now specializing in diseases of the lung, beheld his bleeding, happy-go-lucky tennis-playing son with the usual blend of annoyance and dismay.” Other passages muse on the titular piano washed up on a beach, trussed up and dragged away like a whale, or offer recollections of essays written during Rosenblatt’s tenure at Time magazine. The book also has a fair amount of free association that sounds like “morning pages” written under the influence of Natalie Goldberg. The lines “What did you do? / I loved” recur six times, and several entries are devoted to Rumi’s overexposed quote about the wound being the place where the light enters you, repurposed to better effect by Leonard Cohen. There are fewer than 100 pages of airily laid-out text; the volume is filled out with watercolors. They are lovely, but an account at the end of artist Fred Newman’s computer-assisted method took a bit of the magic away.

This lightweight effort does not add much to the author’s acclaimed oeuvre.