Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire [Hardcover]

Diane Ackerman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

The author of twenty celebrated books of poetry and nonfiction, Diane Ackerman offers a new collection of masterfully crafted poems with an unusual focus.

At the heart of Origami Bridges is the delicate relationship of trust between analyst and patient, a relationship that grows out of the emotional give-and-take of the psychoanalytic process. In this collection, Diane Ackerman, with astonishing candor, lays bare her desires, anger, jealousy, fears, and anxiety as she probes not only her psychic landscape but also her past. And what gradually rises to the surface is an understanding of how the poet uses verse to purge her demons, express her delight, or confess secret longing, and through this process come to a better understanding of the self.

Ackerman's energy and passion are everywhere in evidence, and "she makes the task of putting words to the wordless seem effortless" [Manchester Journal]. Exuberant, lyrical, these are deeply felt poems about life and one of its most important relationships. This collection is Diane Ackerman at the height of her powers as a poet.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Celebrated for her wide-ranging and personal essays on nature, art and love, Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses; Deep Play) has also maintained a career as a poet; this latest volume of short poems "emerged, hot off the heart" (as Ackerman's introduction explains) from her intense and gratifying experience of psychoanalysis. Sometimes addressed to herself and her personal history, at least as often addressed to "Dr. B-," Ackerman's passionate free verse (short, fluent and adorned by irregular rhyme) describes with nearly unmixed awe the relationship she created with her analyst, and the personal transformation she achieved. Unfortunately, the results fare badly as art: cliches, predictable figuration, mixed metaphor, and clunky diction mar almost every page of this strikingly rough, even amateurish, sequence. Very familiar figures for the events and feelings of therapy-and for introspection in general- abound. Patient and doctor "journey alone together/ through the wild country of the soul." Ackerman' speaker "weeps as she nabs/ a fugitive memory/ in an ecstasy of shame"; fears that "I'll lose my inner voice," and devotes one poem to a youthful, hopeful alter ego called Molly: "I can't revive Molly's utopia," she explains, "but I believe there lived and loved once/ a frisky scamp like her." "By reading you/ reading me trying to read you," Ackerman says near the end of her analysis, "I build idioms of acceptance/ from grief's residue"; such self-trust and self-confidence may be admirable in life, but in these poems they sound like self- involvement. Readers who want revealing, white-hot verse based on psychotherapy should stick with Anne Sexton (whose late work these poems faintly resemble); fans of Ackerman's prose will not find her compositional skills in evidence here.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Thematic books of poetry can be tricky, but Ackerman's latest-following several poetry collections and respected works of nonfiction like A Natural History of the Senses-is a resounding success. The poems chronicle a year and a half of psychotherapy carried out by telephone, a situation that Ackerman found comfortable because she once worked as a phone crisis-line counselor. Poets often take the content of their emotional lives as substance for their work, so Ackerman's explicit use of her therapy is a natural next step. Still, the proceedings could have been painfully (or boringly) self-conscious, but Ackerman is far too witty and honest a writer to sink us with pretense. After an opening poem that observes "Though my curiosity/ is swelling like a Megellanic Cloud/ filled with a luminous starfield of questions,/ I'll sacrifice them on the altar of our ineffable cause," Ackerman offers a dazzling exploration of memory, anguish, and desire. Why probe so deeply? "Because it is the way/ of our kind, you and I,/ we ladle idea like hot steel," she concludes. A good answer, and this is hot stuff. Buy it for all contemporary poetry collections.
Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060199881
• ISBN-13: 978-0060199883
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #412,240 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Diane Ackerman is the acclaimed author of "A Natural History of the Senses," the bestselling "The Zookeeper's Wife," "Dawn Light," and many other books. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Library Journal, October 15, 2002, October 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire (Hardcover)

Thematic books of poetry can be tricky, but Ackerman's latest--following several poetry collections and respected works of nonfiction, like A Natural History of the Senses, is a resounding success. The poems chronicle a year and a half of psychotherapy carried ou by telephone, a situation that Ackerman found comfortable because she once worked as a phone crisis-line counselor. Poets often take the content of their emotional lives as substance for their work, so Ackerman's explicit use of her therapy is a natural next step. Still, the proceedings could have been painfully (or boringly) self-conscious, but Ackerman is far too witty and honest a writer to sink us with pretense. After an opening poem that observes "Though my curiosity/ is swelling like a Magellanic Cloud/ filled with a luminous starfield of questions,/ I'll sacrifice them on the altar of our ineffable cause," Ackerman offers a dazzling exploration of memory, anguish, and desire. Why probe so deeply? "Because it is the way/ of our kind, you and I/ we ladle ideas like hot steel," she concludes. A good answer, and this is hot stuff. Buy it for all contemporary poetry collections.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars more, please, October 8, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire (Hardcover)

this is another beautiful and profound collections of poems from Ackerman, one of her generation's most important poetic voices. The poems vary in tone, structure and intent, but underneath all is the poignant, sometimes sweet and often painful yearning to find our heart's center. A book to keep on the bedside table and go back to again and again.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Consolations of Psychology., October 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire (Hardcover)

To my taste, and for my money, the cream of contemporary American poetry is the three women Mary Oliver, Pattiann Rogers, and most of all Diane Ackerman, also renowned for her melodic, phrase-making prose. Ackerman's new book of poems, startlingly personal for her, details a course of therapy she undertook, holding nothing back and casting familiar situations in unusual ways. It is a marvelous, profound, brilliant collection, as moving as authoritative, and an astute, tender account of what it feels like to have a first-rate mind in the presence of an enigmatic world. Ackerman is not exactly a philosopher, but her mind tends that way, and anyone in any kind of doubt about the world that kills us all off sooner or later had best consult Ackerman's candid poems, in which she burrows away into the old problems and the trickiness of traditional ways out. Continually she invites the discerning reader to share her problems, which she exposes with stunning, phrase-making gravity in this, in many ways the most heartfelt of her superb poetry books. She is a non pareil, to be lauded along with the best of poets of the ages-- Rilke, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens. We are lucky to have her and the harmonies of her distinguished mind, the startling poise of her lines.