Right around the corner from our boys’ grade school,

they’d go there — first with us and then, older enough,

with their friends — for after-school treats, Everett’s

bushy mustache always smiling behind the counter.

Thirty-three years is a long time to know someone,

let alone a grocery store, and one could claim that

three generations of kids passed through his doors.

When Augie, our 12-year-old, told me about the sign

on the door he looked away, maybe from the idea itself —

he already knows things change and sometimes disappear.

He knows more than he can put into words. A good

or bad day at school always meant a Snickers bar

or frozen Eskimo Pie, though finding a parking spot,

especially in summer, meant frustration, with all

the workers wanting one of his deviled egg sandwiches

(made only on Wednesdays). The middle school across

the street, the high school not far away, the railroad

station (where men line up looking for work), Bucket’s

certainly has seen its share of good and bad times (mostly

bad now), even when it was only a place to drive past

on one’s way somewhere grander. Places come and go

so it’s hard to say exactly why this one’s so special,

maybe because it’s impossible to imagine a town like

East Hampton, where so much happens that doesn’t stay

or belong here, not having one place unlike any other.

Or maybe it’s because of the children who grow up so fast

and then also leave. Well, Bucket’s, thanks and goodbye.

(Let’s just pray it won’t be replaced by another clothing store!)

    Philip Schultz's most recent collections of poems are "The God of Loneliness" and "Failure," which won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2008. He lives in East Hampton.

Poets Pack a Gallery

    It’s billed as a Valentine’s Day reading of poems — but loosely. The day, Saturday, is after the fact, and the definition of a love poem has been expanded to include, for example, a love for the world.

    Poetry fans should love the lineup. Among those ready to stand and proclaim at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor, one, Naomi Lazard, known hereabouts as a founder of the Hamptons International Film Festival, is the author of a recently rereleased collection, “Ordinances,” which knows not of lovely but rather is an at times hair-raising channeling of the voices of the modern bureaucratic state and the faceless corporation.

    Megan Chaskey, a musician and educator, and her husband, Scott Chaskey, of Quail Hill Farm, are also due in the gallery, as is Kathy Engel, an activist and New York University professor whose work not long ago appeared in “Liberty’s Vigil: The Occupy Anthology.”

    The others, East Enders all, are George Held, Jean Ely, Brenda Simmons, Maria Burns, and Jill Morris. Books will be available, and available for signing, and refreshments will be served. Put together by Clare Coss, a playwright and poet herself, the reading starts at 1:30 p.m.

From Rucker to Rowdy

    Science fiction readers, it’s not too late to grab a copy of Rudy Rucker’s “Spaceland” in advance of the inaugural gathering of a new book club at the East Hampton Library on Wednesday at 6 p.m.

    Subtitled “A Novel of the Fourth Dimension,” it follows the evocatively named Joe Cube just before the turn of the 21st century. He’s a techie in Silicon Valley — the species and the place both get sent up — and the machine he’s researching sets off, shall we say, all manner of weirdness. Copies are at the reference desk.

    It may be too late to read for today’s lunchtime book club gathering at Rowdy Hall in East Hampton, but given the title, “Smut,” you might just want to sit in and listen.

    (Actually, what’s in Alan Bennett’s book are two stories of middle-class women leading double lives in England.)

    The Rowdy Readers will meet at 12:15 each Thursday through March 22 and can help themselves to a 15-percent discount on the titles at BookHampton. Next up is Sara Levine’s novel “Treasure Island!!!” Also on the list: “Mr. g” by Alan Lightman, “The Coral Sea” by Patti Smith, “Jackson Pollock” by Evelyn Toynton, and “Ragnarok” by A.S. Byatt.

Look Ahead, Writers

    February on eastern Long Island. It can seem like the calendar’s equivalent of 3 a.m., when nothing good happens, not even snow. But using the down time to plan for better days — how about July? — is Julie Sheehan, the director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton, who sends word of a boatload of writing workshops bound to set heads nodding in appreciation.

    Among them: the short story with Jay McInerney and Melissa Bank, the novel with Ursula Hegi, fiction with Meg Wolitzer, memoir with Roger Rosenblatt, the personal essay with David Rakoff, creative nonfiction with Matthew Klam, and poetry with Billy Collins, Mary Karr, and Robert Wrigley. A complete list, faculty bios, and applications are online at southamptonarts.org.

    Maybe you should take advantage before the place becomes a casino or a subdivision.

Springs Valentine

    In “How to Make a Martini,” a prose poem by Julie Sheehan, she of the above mention, our heroine, a hard-bitten divorcée of a barkeep (“I reach for the cheap stuff, service with a shrug”), finds her mind wandering as she practices her liquid arts, thinking of how she used to rub her ex’s head. “Then I would let three small-to-medium sized olives drift down into the glass, down to the bottom, like a marriage falling down the stairs slowly.”

    Who says love poems have to be bad?

    That’s from “Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise,” a bracing melding of high brow and low life, downbeat story and overactive intellect, with recipes, tables and figures, drawings of snifters and shakers, extensive footnotes, and among its sources “Counterinsurgency” by David Petraeus. It was published by W.W. Norton in 2010, the latest of Ms. Sheehan’s three collections.

    Now, about Valentine’s Day: Ms. Sheehan, an East Quoguer by residence, will read from her work at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Sunday at 11:30 a.m. for Rock My Heart, an event organized by Teri Kennedy. (Open mike sign-up is at 11.) It also involves the world music of Alfredo Merat, a “meditation on love” by Eve Eliot, and a reception with coffee afterward. Karyn Mannix’s “Love and Passion” art show is on view there, too.  

“Elizabeth and Hazel”

David Margolick

Yale University Press, $26

  Elizabeth and Hazel, two women of Little Rock captured in an iconic photograph, tell the story of Southern school desegregation. The classic frame reveals our beautiful young black heroine, Elizabeth Eckford, as she is harried by a hydra-headed lynch mob in formation. Hazel, the long-unidentified woman behind Elizabeth, is shown screaming racial epithets while dogging the heels of the slender, apparently serene and stoic schoolchild.

    For years that twisted face of an unknown harridan symbolized my redneck South in all its unrepentant racist glory — massively resisting social change. The two, one black, one white, along with eight other black youngsters, made Little Rock famous enough to dispense with “Arkansas” after it. In my home state of Alabama, they never needed to add “Tennessee” to signs urging, “See Rock City!” In 1957 another famous Rock joined the one in Tennessee.

    Hazel and Elizabeth’s griot, David Margolick, a Connecticut Yankee and veteran of various crusades, reveals himself to be a gentle, patient, and persistent interlocutor. The picture, snapped by Will Counts in the fall of 1957, captures both women like battling bugs suddenly paralyzed in amber. The attacker, Hazel Bryan, long thought to be a grown woman, maybe because of her sexy dress, was tracked down years later. She was revealed to be a fellow student — the same age as Elizabeth. The photo captured the imagination of Mr. Margolick, a writer for Vanity Fair. He labored to crack the encasing amber, releasing the two, now adults, to continue their struggle.

    The ensuing friendship between the women, their attempts at reconciliation, and the uncertain outcome occupy the bulk of this must-read book.

    Comparing and contrasting the backgrounds, character, and personalities of the two women of Little Rock, the author illuminates class, caste, and gender issues by using multiple lenses. He explores then and now, black and white, legend and reality. Mr. Margolick’s tale of Hazel’s apology to Elizabeth for her racist behavior and their subsequent friendship is simply stunning.

    The surprise coming together of the two icons, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, eventually results in their sharing podiums and talking about racial reconciliation.

    Is reconciliation possible? Is it even on the agenda? The story’s denouement, revealed slowly and lovingly by the author, is certainly astounding and informative, yet it remains somewhat unsatisfying. It is cautionary. Once in every generation or two something catches the imagination of the American public, providing a collective learning experience. A hinge turns somewhere in the universe, indicating things can never be the same again. School integration in Little Rock was such a moment.

    All 35 governors, before Orval Eugene Faubus took office in 1955, governed Arkansas as a quietly segregated state, except for occasional lynchings, like the one Mr. Margolick chronicles at the beginning of the book, occurring in 1927. Faubus, confronting the crisis of school integration, hung on for 11 more years by morphing cynically from a moderate on “the racial question” into a racist redneck hater.

    Like Gov. George Wallace of my state of Alabama, who stood in the schoolhouse door, Faubus knew better. Wallace and Faubus, both moderates on race, sold their souls and their integrity as human beings for a mess of political pottage. They had a chance to be true American heroes. As great as being governor is, the office is piddling compared to a chance to make a contribution to human rights. Did they really believe they, along with Bull Connor, Louise Day Hicks, Byron De La Beckwith, and Justice Clarence Thomas, would go down in history as great Americans?

    Elizabeth and Hazel, two little women of Little Rock, were caught up as children in this historic struggle. Elizabeth Eckford was the heroine of school integration in 1957, joining the pantheon occupied by Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Dorothy Height, and Martin Luther King Jr. These are real heroes today. In my opinion, Hazel, too, became a hero by trying to rise above the racism she grew up with and reaching out to make amends.

    Historians argue that integration might have succeeded early on had speed and certainty won out over slow and deliberate. In the military, where orders are routinely followed, integration occurred quickly. Why didn’t Southern states integrate when ordered to do so by the Supreme Court? “Deliberate speed,” an olive branch offered by the court, allowed time for the forces of massive resistance to organize. When racists began to resist in Little Rock, the racially moderate Faubus could have been a statesman. Being of small character and short vision, however, he settled for more years in an insignificant governor’s office.

    Julian Bond, communications director of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and chairman emeritus of the N.A.A.C.P., says Little Rock, along with Emmett Till’s lynching, made him an activist. Black and white Southerners, contemporaries of Elizabeth Eckford and Till, testify how Till’s death frightened us, especially black youth, and how Elizabeth inspired us. Mr. Bond at first believed the movement needed only to bring injustice, bigotry, and racial atrocities to the attention of good Americans and it would be fixed.

    In fact, our struggle is depicted exactly that way in history books. Grade school and most college survey courses tell a beautiful story: “Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks boycotted buses in Montgomery, egged on by ‘Malcolm the Tenth’ (Malcolm X). American democracy was seen to be imperfect. President Kennedy and his brother fixed it; then everyone lived happily ever after, amen.”

    Happily, Mr. Margolick won’t settle for that. Freedom, we now know, is a constant struggle and must be worked at in every generation. The right wing constantly rolls back our victories. The Southern strategy, demonstrated by George Wallace and adopted by Reagan and the Republicans, is a good example.

    Critics ask why Mr. Margolick picks at scabs. Can’t we all just get along? He finds that a truly integrated life, or lifestyle, if possible at all given our bleak racial history, must be worked at. Progressive people, drawn to Elizabeth and Hazel’s cautionary tale, will now ask themselves a potentially embarrassing question: How racially integrated is my life?

    At the end of “Elizabeth and Hazel” (the book, not the story, because it has not yet ended), the two, who famously reconciled, have not spoken for a decade. Will their story be a comedy or a tragedy?

    Comedy’s conclusion or denouement always leaves the protagonist better off at the end. Tragedy usually ends in catastrophe, with the protagonist worse off than before. Who’s the protagonist in this drama? Who is the villain? Did the book go to press in the middle of a comedy or will it be another tragedy?

—

  David Margolick has a house in Sag Harbor.

    Bob Zellner is the author of “The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement.” He lives in Southampton.

“Pushcart Prize XXXVI”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $18.95

Now in its 36th year, the annual Pushcart Prize anthology, “Best of the Small Presses,” has become a standard title for anyone interested in a sampling of who or what is happening in contemporary American literature.

The anthology has reached a point that the reviews from year to year are probably rather much the same: Each assessment pronounces a respectable selection of older and younger writers with pieces that range from outstanding to good to not so good to simply boring. From year to year the critical consensus may change as to which genre is better represented in that particular volume: Is the selected poetry better than the chosen fiction, or do the essays or memoirs eclipse both?

The Pushcart Prize has also been around long enough for there to be an ongoing irate reaction to its annual appearance. The grousers will assert that the selections are too safe or too predictable, lamenting that the authors are not one’s friends, one’s wife, or one’s self. The represented presses may also be bemoaned as being too safe, too predictable, or not owned by one’s friends, one’s wife, or one’s self.

The fairness and objectivity of the selection process will be argued as those not selected, and the friends and mothers of those not selected, rail against the innocuous, pedestrian choices once again made by the minions of the conservative literary establishment. (This year there are 52 presses represented, 15 of which appear for the first time, out of more than 650 small presses.)

Any compilation of any kind with “best” in its title is open to this type of disdain and quibbling. But truth be told, the annual appearance of the Pushcart Prize is, as always, an ideal opportunity to enjoy, discover (or rediscover), and, yes, quibble about a considerable array of poetry, fiction, memoir, and essays, whether they be the year’s best (whatever that may mean) or not. The current volume is no exception. It is difficult to think that anyone picking up this book and even cursorily thumbing through it would not find at least a few pieces to enjoy and appreciate.

For example, there are several exceptional stories this year; among them are Elizabeth Tallent’s arresting “Never Come Back,” the haunting “Girls, at Play” by Celeste Ng, Sandra Leong’s “We Don’t Deserve This,” and Frederic Tuten’s elegant “The Veranda.” Poetry is well represented by selections from Alice Friman, Joy Katz, and Stephen Dobyns. John Murillo’s “Song,” Douglas Goetsch’s “Black People Can’t Swim,” and Mark Halliday’s “Meditation After an Excellent Dinner” are first among equals here.

The selection of nonfiction is particularly outstanding. Among the very best essays are Anis Shivani’s necessarily scathing “The MFA/Creative Writing System Is a Closed, Undemocratic, Medieval Guild System That Represses Good Writing” (the title really says it all), “Never Give an Inch” by Gerald Howard, which considers the scarcity and importance of the working-class author, and Lisa Couturier’s “Dark Horse,” a disturbing depiction of horse auctions and the fate of those horses that fall to the “kill buyers.”

Mark Richard’s selection from his memoir, “House of Prayer No. 2,” is one of the exceptional pieces of any genre. Using the second person singular, he draws the reader into his bizarre Dickensian childhood world of pain, misunderstanding, and spirituality as a “special child,” one who suffers from hip defects as well as the perception that he is “slow.”

Perhaps in any other year Mr. Richard’s piece would be the hands-down best selection of the anthology, but here it is rivaled by the memoir of another Southern writer, John Jeremiah Sullivan, although his is far different in tone. His funny and affectionate (as well as poignant and a bit creepy) “Mr. Lytle: An Essay” deals with his time as a “kind of apprentice” or aide to the 92-year-old Andrew Lytle, the longtime editor of The Sewanee Review and the last of the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers and philosophers that included Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, during the last year of his life. Mr. Richards and Mr. Sullivan share a talent for keen observation, and they each write with a seeming effortlessness and grace about offbeat situations made very real. Both of these remarkable writers touch the reader’s heart as well as mind.

Mr. Sullivan’s essay is also among a number of pieces that give this volume, intentionally or not, a lingering thematic sense of death and bereavement. It begins with Bill Henderson’s introduction and his remembrance of Reynolds Price, a founding editor of the Pushcart Press, and continues with such pieces as Mr. Dobyns’s fine poem for Hayden Carruth, “Laugh,” Leon Stokesbury’s “Watching My Mother Take Her Last Breath,” Deborah Thompson’s moving “Mishti Kukur,” in which she recounts her trip to India six years after her husband’s death to visit his relatives, Gerald Stern’s brief poetic remembrance of Pablo Casals, Eve Becker’s touching memoir concerning her father, “Final Concert,” and stories by Susan Steinberg and Anna Solomon.

A word or two regarding Mr. Henderson, whose yearly introductions to these anthologies should not go unnoticed but often do. Not that he has been necessarily overlooked, having been recognized by the National Book Critics Circle and Poets & Writers, among others, but it is good to be reminded of the chance he took 36 years ago and the service he has provided to readers since then. It is an almost impossible task for the general reader to keep up with the small presses, but over the years Mr. Henderson and the Pushcart Press have provided a convenient means of entrance into at least part of this vital literary world.

Neither he nor the Pushcart Press is perfect — from year to year some of the volumes’ inclusions as well as exclusions are head-scratchers. And Mr. Henderson needs to curb his rants against online writing and e-readers and concede that good writing can be and is found on the Internet. But these caveats do not lessen the reader’s debt to him for taking a long ago leap of faith and for continuing to produce an always generous and varied view into one corner of the ever-evolving American literary scene.

—

Bill Henderson is the author of, most recently, “All My Dogs: A Life.” He lives in Springs.

After 30 years of teaching literature at Southampton College, William Roberson now works at Long Island University’s Brentwood campus. He lives in Mastic.

    If New York’s Gilded Age had once appeared to be gently disappearing into the pages of the history books, the last few years, laden with financial malfeasance, Wall Street greed, burgeoning poverty, and an ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor, have made it chillingly relevant.

“Incognito”

Gregory Murphy

Berkley Books, $15

    In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “In the United States the more opulent citizens take care not to stand aloof from the people.” He spoke too soon. A few decades later, New York society, the 1 percent of its day, was marked by a rigid caste system of snobbish old money, striving new money, draconian rules of social behavior, and mindless excess.

    Gregory Murphy’s “Incognito” captures with quiet assurance the tail end of the Gilded Age in all its glittering hypocrisy. He paints a picture of a world where appearances were all that mattered and a universal collusion denied, or at least ignored, the corruption and venality that lay just below the surface. This is a mystery without dead bodies (although with a whole truckload of closeted skeletons) — a Chinese box of a mystery in which puzzles solved lead only to more puzzles.

    William Dysart is a lawyer born to old-moneyed wealth. Although unhappy with the vapid society around him, with his controlling father, and particularly with his beautiful, cold, and manipulative wife, he seems mired in inertia, in a desire for a quiet life with no boats rocked.

    Until, that is, he is sent on a routine errand for the widow of a rich financier represented by his firm. She intends to donate her vast estate on Long Island Sound to become a public park, and he is instructed to make a generous offer to buy a tiny plot of adjoining land with a cottage. The land, he has been told, is essential to the development of the entire park.

    But the reclusive young owner of the cottage, Sybil Curtis, refuses to sell, even though she knows the widow has the influence to get the land seized by the state for far less than it is worth. William realizes there is some kind of personal relationship between the women, though both deny it. He also realizes that the land is in no way important to the development of the park. Intrigued by the contradictions of the case, and increasingly attracted to the young woman, he finds himself trying to help her.

    What was her relationship with the rich financier? Where does she come from? Why does an attractive woman live in isolation in a cottage that seems to be all she possesses but which she appears willing to throw away? Is she an innocent or, as becomes more and more apparent, something quite different?

    As he tries to discover who Sybil is, William is also forced to discover who he is himself, to stir himself out of his inertia and begin to question his own past for the first time. Why did his mother suddenly leave when he was 6, and how did she die? Why will his father not speak of it? Why does no photograph or drawing of his mother exist? His only maternal relative is an aunt whom he has never met. He has always accepted his father’s description of her as some kind of unnatural monster. But is this true? As he begins to find answers to his questions both about Sybil and about himself, he at last takes control of his life.

    “Incognito” is full of toothsome Gilded Age details about the great mansions of the day, about yachts and private railroad cars and gentlemen’s clubs, about trunkloads of couture dresses ordered from Paris and sent back again each time they needed cleaning, about the endless rounds of balls and teas and nights at the opera. But what will remain with you is when Mr. Murphy, who is the 7th of 11 children born and raised in Amityville, peels back the gilded lid to reveal a little of the sad depravity underneath.

    And last, but by no means least, “Incognito” is a tender and satisfying love story.

—

    Gregory Murphy is the author of “The Countess,” a play about the marriage of the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin and Effie Gray. He lives in New York City.

    Sheridan Sansegundo, a former arts editor at The Star, lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

“Kayak Morning”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco, $13.99

    Last year was the year of the grief memoir. Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story” concerns the loss of her husband. Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye” takes as its subject the death of her mother. Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights” mourns the death of her daughter. In those works, through the act of memory, the authors skillfully bring to life the loved one who is mourned.

    Roger Rosenblatt’s project in his beautifully observed “Kayak Morning” is different but no less moving. “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead,” writes Ms. Didion in “Blue Nights.” This is the scourge Mr. Rosenblatt is asked to bear.    Two and a half years after his 38-year-old daughter, Amy, a mother of three young children and a pediatrician, died of an undetected anomalous right coronary artery, Mr. Rosenblatt takes up kayaking to battle his grief. “In kayaking, taking the opposite way can save your life . . . when you are completely off balance, so much so that you are certain you will topple over — you bring the paddle down hard on the water’s surface. . . . You will feel your kayak right itself. Only by moving in the direction you least trust can you be saved,” he writes.

    Part elegy and part quest to understand the unrelenting pain of loss and the senseless death of his daughter, “Kayak Morning” is an insightful and necessary meditation on grief and the mercurial state of mind it evokes.

    Few memories of the lost daughter are revealed; Mr. Rosenblatt covered that ground in his acclaimed “Making Toast,” in which he shared the story of his family in the days and months after losing his daughter. By not bringing Amy to life, he runs the risk of excluding the reader from the emotional impact of the narrative, but this is not Mr. Rosenblatt’s intention. His intent is to evoke the wayward, unknowable, chaotic journey of grief and the guilt, anger, and unrelenting pain associated with it. Not only is “Kayak Morning” a moving meditation on the passages of grief, it is a profound reflection on the eternal and sustaining nature of love.

    Mr. Rosenblatt, an acclaimed writer and professor of writing and a self-proclaimed loner, takes up kayaking to seek solitude and the possibility and hope of spiritual reconnection with his daughter as he embraces the water. “To water everything returns,” he writes, “a chambered nautilus,” “cuttlefish,” “silver sardines,” “a school of mackerel,” and for Mr. Rosenblatt it brings him closer to the visceral essence of his primal union with his daughter: “A girl may speak the truth to her father, who may speak the truth to her. He anchors her. She anchors him.”

    The journey commences at Penniman’s Creek, an inlet shaped like a “wizard’s hat,” not far from his house in Quogue. The creek is about 200 yards wide at the mouth and half a mile long leading from the village to the Quogue Canal. Everyone who has had to bear grief knows that it is not circumscribed. “You can’t always make your way in the world by moving up. Or down, for that matter. Boats move laterally on water, which levels everything,” he writes.

    The solitude and the ritualistic rhythm of paddling give him a sense of purpose and provide respite for the alienation he feels in the presence of others, who can’t fully know his pain. “I turn. It turns. The kayak creates little wake. I swerve. It swerves. I move with it. It moves with me.” The art of kayaking, of being one with the water, becomes a perfect metaphor for how in grief we carry the departed with us.

    When a death is unexpected, as was the case for Mr. Rosenblatt, we especially witness the brutality, rage, chaos, and imbalance it unleashes. Mr. Rosenblatt searches for order and answers. Like all significant and urgent works, the art of writing provides him with a canvas to examine the paradoxes of death.

    “Kayak Morning” is made up of short lyrical vignettes, poetic verses, snippets of conversational exchanges, and embedded quotations from Melville, Emerson, Stevens, and other luminaries, forming, if you will, a book-length quarrel or argument with the self, that seeks to find solace and meaning even as it acknowledges that no meaning or amount of faith can be satisfactory if the cost is a precious life.

“It colors everything I do,” I said.

“What did you expect?” said my friend.

“I’m in a box.”

“Isn’t that what grief is?”

“You’re the doctor. You tell me.”

“What do you want?” she said.

“I want out.”

“What do you really want?”

“I want her back.”

“Well,” she said, “you’ll have to find a way to get her back.”

    In his search for meaning, Mr. Rosenblatt is an amiable, intelligent, and at times darkly ironic guide. Though parallels between “Kayak Morning” and C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed” have been drawn, Lewis finds solace in faith, whereas Mr. Rosenblatt finds it in love.

    If redemption is to be found in grief, Mr. Rosenblatt discovers it in his refusal to bury his daughter’s memory. Unlike Emerson, who, he conjectures from his essay “Experience,” about the death of his son Waldo, “steeled himself in the name of some higher truth and superior thought,” Mr. Rosenblatt allows himself to continually experience the pain of grief and to feel his daughter’s death. He does not deny his emotions.

    The epiphany he discovers in his poetic journey is that “love conquers death.” No “celestial jury” will bring Amy back, but in every minute since she died Mr. Rosenblatt is aware of his love for her. “She lives in my love,” as all our beloved ones do, if we choose to live too in the emotions of our loss.

—

    Jill Bialosky, who lives part time in Bridgehampton, is a poet, novelist, and editor. Her memoir, “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life,” will be released in paperback in February.

“The Last Whaler”

Nicholas Stevensson Karas

AuthorHouse, $25

    When I checked my morning mail several months ago, I was surprised by a large mystery envelope. I was delighted to see it contained a local historical novel. These are rare creatures out here on the tip of Long Island; not as rare as academics trying to put into words our underpublished history, but still rare enough to cause me to look it over before placing it on my stack of evening reading.

    The stunning painting on the cover of Capt. Nicholas Stevensson Karas’s second novel, “The Last Whaler,” is a dynamic 1841 oil by Thomas Birch, a Philadelphia artist. The finesse that this British-born painter used to delineate the power of a stormy sea and the vulnerability of the ship’s crew is an invitation to an adventure. Though the cliché regarding books’ covers and contents is well worn, Captain Karas uses words as well as Birch’s image to draw us into his tale: “A historic novel based on a true whaling adventure of a Shinnecock Indian as told to a Long Island merchant seaman. The events took place between 1865 and 1942.” These lines, printed across the angry green ocean on the cover, are as seductive as the art.

    Melville produced one of America’s greatest novels, mixed with allegory, using men, the sea, and a white whale. I certainly wasn’t about to prepare myself for a new “Moby-Dick,” but a whaling story revolving around a Shinnecock seemed to offer ample possibilities. Whal­ing, after all, is as operatic as business can be. And the cover did say “based on a true whaling adventure.”

    After dinner I sat down, ready to entrust the author with the ship’s wheel. Now I should explain, I am a historian specializing in the East End of Long Island. I enjoy both fiction and nonfiction. I expect historians to back up their theories with primary source material, but I understand that novelists should invent and embroider because they are storytellers and mythmakers. All that said, I became disappointed with “The Last Whaler” quite quickly. I blame the cover.

    The prologue is filled with misinformation, and there seems no logical reason to set such a false stage for a story purported to be based on fact. The author has Long Island’s East End settled in the 1670s instead of the 1640s. He has our first mainland settlements established by Quakers rather than Puritans. And mixing up Sag Harbor with the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, Captain Karas has the first local whaling captains as “ever-industrious Quake entrepreneurs.” The author has created something called “the Company” — “a loose assortment of ship owners, ship chandlers, whale oil supportive industries, retired whaleship captains, widows and farmers and fisher Quakers” — which controlled what was left of Sag Harbor’s once giant whaling industry. There is no evidence that such an organization ever existed, and what history has passed down to us portrays the typical Sag Harbor captain or whaleship owner as independent and proud of it.

    The most slippery historical slope that Captain Karas climbs is his creation of a myth about Shinnecock sailors. It is known that the native people of Long Island’s East End were famous for their agility at capturing whales by boat offshore. Early local historians have recorded that the Shinnecocks and Montauketts were quick to teach the colonists their fishing techniques. Beginning in the early 19th century, any perusal of whaling logs here supports the role of natives as crew members. Indeed, several Shinnecock whalemen became famous as harpooners and boatmen. What seems an invention is the author’s premise that the crew of a whaleship would consider “jumping ship before it departed because no Indian” was on board. There is no question about the respect crews had for the prowess of native people as whale hunters. But while this myth has no grounding with historians, it is crucial to the narrative.

    “The Last Whaler” is very engaging as the author paints a gray-green film over the once proud Village of Sag Harbor. The year is 1865 and the country has changed forever with the close of the Civil War. Change had already started to erode this famous whaling village. Petroleum had erased the value of whale oil. Whalebone was still needed by the New England corset and umbrella manufacturers, but the four-year whale oil journeys, around the tip of South America up to the Bering Sea, were obsolete. Watchcase making would soon help Sag Harbor, but that is the next chapter.

    The village was haunted by its days of wealth. The streets were darkened. The parlor doors were closed tight, and the rosewood suites of carved furniture shrouded with bed sheeting. The old men and women who remained (they had nowhere to go) clanked about like strings of bones or fallen wind chimes. This is where we meet the remains of the Company, holding on to a past that has long ago evaporated. Though historically several more whaleships would leave the harbor, the author smartly takes 1865 as the year of the end.

    The Lester brothers, Andrew and Hiram, along with a cousin, Ephraim Brown, have convinced the last of the Company to repair and outfit the old whaling bark Tranquility for one last try at a hold full of whale oil with a trip down the coast of South America possibly as far as the Falkland Islands. As the plans are laid and the ship is readied, the living ghosts of the community seem to feel a cold sense of good riddance rather than farewell.

    Finally a patchwork crew is assembled, but will they sail without the mythic Shinnecock? A plot is formed and 15-year-old Benquam is kidnapped and taken aboard just before the Tranquility sets sail. The trip is a bumpy one for Benquam, the captain, the crew, and the reader.

    It is a story of mourning, regret, ego, murder, kidnapping, pride, and revenge. The dialogue is very carefully written, but wooden. As to the dialect, a great deal of research was most likely done by the author. But the language is not colloquial; it tends toward lecturing to inform the reader of period nautical terms and activities. The plot is fast paced and grows much faster as the novel nears its end — a race that seems to end abruptly. The characters do grow on the reader, but they lack rounding and rarely surprise us. Once in their personality boxes, they remain there.

    With 30 years under his belt as a licensed captain, the author knows modern boats and has carefully studied how a whaling bark was crewed. Some of his best writing involves the very detailed description of just how the Tranquility was sailed.

    Our young Shinnecock gets put aside as the story becomes more visceral. Benquam is really a device for starting and concluding the dramatic tale. During an almost cinemagraphic storm sequence, I could not put the book down. But hanging over this novel is the assertion that the narrative is based on fact and not fabrication. Does it make any difference? Would the story be better if Benquam had really existed? I think yes.

    Captain Karas has written an engrossing story that could have been richer. I wish the author had taken advantage of a proofreader, editor, and historian. I think that a historian could have helped turn the book’s factual messiness into a real and useful introduction to the South Fork’s whaling story.

    And I would strongly suggest that the book need not mislead the reader by touting any resemblance to “a true whaling adventure of a Shinnecock Indian as told to a Long Island merchant seaman.” This is pure imagination. No Shinnecock historian, no whaling history maven, no local historian or Long Island maritime museum director has ever heard this tale, and certainly the author adds no footnote or other source to document this fantastic yarn about a young Shinnecock boy being kidnapped in 1865 and discovered on an island in 1942 alive and well. Let fiction be fiction.

—

    Nicholas Stevensson Karas was an outdoors columnist for Newsday for many years. He lives in Orient Point.

    Richard Barons is the executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society. He lives in Springs.

“Portrait of Long Island”

    When it comes to gift-giving, books are all well and good as gestures, but, let’s face it, they almost always go unread. This is where the picture book comes in — thoughtfulness acknowledged, it can be flipped through in a matter of seconds and placed for all time on a coffee table as decoration.

    For your consideration, then, is the photographer Jake Rajs’s “Portrait of Long Island,” handsome, colorful, well papered, well bound. From the Monacelli Press, it covers “The North Fork and the Hamptons,” as its subtitle has it, and everything in between (er, Shelter Island). In addition to shots you’d expect — Shinnecock Inlet and Georgica Pond from on high, wide beaches fortified with snow fence, the Flanders landmark the Big Duck — there’s the unexpected: the Springs General Store at night, for instance, looking for all the world like an Edward Hopper composition, or the Beach Bakery Cafe in Westhampton Beach, its windows as amber as a good bottle of Scotch.

    The book has essays, too. In a discussion of the South Fork, Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for The New Yorker, offers a word portrait when he quotes The Star’s former editor Everett Rattray’s description of Long Island as “a whale with a healthy trunk and skull, its forehead nuzzling Manhattan and its jaws about to bite Staten Island. The whale’s flukes, the North and South Forks at the eastern end, dangle off in the distance toward Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod in Massachusetts.”

“Countdown to Immortality”

    Futurists get a bad, Popular Mechanics rap, don’t they. But hold the flying cars and personalized jet packs, a recent book edited by Flora Schnall of the Amagansett Press documents a host of forward-thinking imaginings that not only weren’t trivial, they came to pass with world-altering effect.

    They were courtesy of one FM Esfandiary, who at first streamlined his name by losing the dots around his initials because they slowed him down before he went on to jettison the name entirely in favor of the unencumbering, farsighted FM-2030. (As relates to the title of the book, “Countdown to Immortality,” 2030 is the year he believed that “humans could opt to be ageless with the chance to live forever,” Ms. Schnall writes in the introduction.) His predictions include instant and globe-linking communications technology, genetic engineering, and even, perhaps as perfected in the Clinton administration, governance through public-opinion polls.

    FM-2030, brutally handsome in his youth, as the book’s one photo reveals, was the son of an Iranian diplomat. He played basketball for that country in the 1948 Olympics. In the U.S., he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, among other institutions, and wrote a series of books about the future as well as three novels, which is a form of immortality in itself.

    He died in 2000 at the age of 69, leaving the revisions to “Countdown to Immortality” not quite done, to be finished by Ms. Schnall. An extensive questioning of nature’s final dictate, it may be best appreciated by those already familiar with his work — a completion of an oeuvre.

    In his own attempt to circumvent death, FM-2030 had his body frozen in Scottsdale, Ariz. Given his track record of prognostication, the facility might consider investing in another warehouse. B.G.

Poetry in Patchogue

    As the book review on this page indicates, Patchogue contains multitudes.

    On one hand, as an example, the compiler of this column heard his physics teacher at Bridgehampton High circa 1985 express a not uncommon view when he began a discussion of the place with, “If God were to give New York an enema. . . .”

    On the other hand, it’s still got its share of stately Victorian houses, a hell of a waterfront, a fine brewery, and a public library with the top reference desk and most comprehensive music collection in the county. And (Riverhead, take note) what’s more moving or encouraging than a small American city gamely fighting to maintain a vibrant core?

    Toward that end, behold the Poetry Place on Waverly Avenue, red-bricked and ready for readings. It offers them most Fridays and Saturdays, after which the podium is open to all comers. Tomorrow at 7 p.m., there’s one by Phil Postiglione and Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan of the North Sea Poetry Scene, the organization behind the relatively recent establishment of the Long Island Poetry Archival/Arts Center, as it’s officially called, “the only historical archive of its kind on Long Island.”

    What’s more, the place will benefit from a “poetry performance” by Suffolk’s current poet laureate, Ed Stever, an adjunct professor of English at Suffolk Community College’s Eastern Campus, and his Poetry Theater Ensemble on Saturday at 3 p.m. The event, which costs $10, also involves one-act plays by Mr. Stever and Barbara Kirshner. It’ll take place in the Clare Rose Playhouse of St. Joseph’s College — in Patchogue.

“Bread & Poetry”

    The poet, activist, and New York University professor Kathy Engel, a founder of the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, will read from her work for “Bread & Poetry: A Sagittarian Reading,” the first of what is to be a new series there, tomorrow at 6 p.m. Ms. Engel, who is also a founder of MADRE, the international women’s rights organization, will be joined by Cheryl Boyce Taylor, a Trinidad-born author of three collections of poems, the most recent of which is “Convincing the Body.”

    The “Bread & . . .” series, for adults and students, is also, as advertised, for foodies, this first one with a focaccia-making workshop and various South Fork food purveyors on hand, from Amber Waves Farm to David Falkowski, the mushroom man, from the Wolffer Estate Vineyard to the Mecox Bay Dairy. The suggested donation is $10.