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| Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire | 
| Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $11.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 1218276
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.4
ISBN: 0060555297
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780060555290
ASIN: 0060555297
Publication Date: October 1, 2003
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 7 | | NEXT » |
 Precious as It is Rare November 26, 2003
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
In Origami Bridges, Diane Ackerman writes a book of poems based on her year and a half's therapy, mostly by telephone, that is truly a book, with realized characters, precise environments, plotted conflicts and resolutions that culminate, as therapy ought and literature may, in shared humanity-- all in varying verse fizzed by wit and wonder in thought and word. These ninety-odd poems, divided into four sections, hint an extended dramatic monologue, where the poet as bravura speaker manifests herself and the tantalizing presence of her absent therapist in a verse relationship. Identified as Dr. B. and addressed as "you," the good doctor must be chiefly silent, so not there when most there. Ackerman's lyric-dramatic monologue could be staged: reconsider the neglected possibilities of Strindberg's The Stranger or Cocteau's La voix humaine, not their tone or theme. Monologue suits Ackerman's one-talks-the-other-doesn't scenario as she lived it, as, in fact, we know it too, if we do, from the therapeutic experience. In such Jamesian readings, Ackerman decants certain tentativeness from her skilling mind at work and play with one of modern life's best recognized yet most closeted dramas. Neither case history nor yet another dip into a dark night of the soul-pointedly, hers is an ascent, a climb to Tibet, and back-Origami Bridges did serve a useful purpose, becoming, as Ackerman writes in "A Note to Readers," 'an important part of therapy, another place where we could meet." "However," she explains, "my chief goal with this book was to write the best poetry I could; its usefulness in therapy was felicitous, but secondary." That primary purpose stirs her book into varieties of form and utterance-an exploration of self, of one's selves, should invite an exploration of forms, shouldn't it?-including a finely rhymed and timed sonnet contemplating an escape from the commitment. Throughout, Ackerman's voice ranges too, from gentle phrasings to brave, playful acrobatics of diction and figures of speech. As readers know from her many other books of prose and poems, Ackerman writes close to a Renaissance fondness for wordplay as well as to a contemporary expertness of observation. Her repleteness of selves (her "severals") emerges, with cheerful courage, in shimmering delicacy not susceptible to fragility, as well as in fears just painful enough to contemplate. Her pain "still bleats" as she "frets in pentameter" so that "even my fingerprints ache." Yet there's also her science, her garden, and her pluck. Precious as it is rare, the dance of her unifying and separating several selves informs this book with a truly American presence, perhaps best known to us in the iconic Howard Hawks woman-if such can be an author. If so, this book's a wise and steady, lovely pal. --Santa Fe Sentinel
Santa Fe Sentinel review November 26, 2003
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
In Origami Bridges, Diane Ackerman writes a book of poems based on her year and a half's therapy, mostly by telephone, that is truly a book, with realized characters, precise environments, plotted conflicts and resolutions that culminate, as therapy ought and literature may, in shared humanity-- all in varying verse fizzed by wit and wonder in thought and word. These ninety-odd poems, divided into four sections, hint an extended dramatic monologue, where the poet as bravura speaker manifests herself and the tantalizing presence of her absent therapist in a verse relationship. Identified as Dr. B. and addressed as "you," the good doctor must be chiefly silent, so not there when most there. Ackerman's lyric-dramatic monologue could be staged: reconsider the neglected possibilities of Strindberg's The Stranger or Cocteau's La voix humaine, not their tone or theme. Monologue suits Ackerman's one-talks-the-other-doesn't scenario as she lived it, as, in fact, we know it too, if we do, from the therapeutic experience. In such Jamesian readings, Ackerman decants certain tentativeness from her skilling mind at work and play with one of modern life's best recognized yet most closeted dramas. Neither case history nor yet another dip into a dark night of the soul-pointedly, hers is an ascent, a climb to Tibet, and back-Origami Bridges did serve a useful purpose, becoming, as Ackerman writes in "A Note to Readers," 'an important part of therapy, another place where we could meet." "However," she explains, "my chief goal with this book was to write the best poetry I could; its usefulness in therapy was felicitous, but secondary." That primary purpose stirs her book into varieties of form and utterance-an exploration of self, of one's selves, should invite an exploration of forms, shouldn't it?-including a finely rhymed and timed sonnet contemplating an escape from the commitment. Throughout, Ackerman's voice ranges too, from gentle phrasings to brave, playful acrobatics of diction and figures of speech. As readers know from her many other books of prose and poems, Ackerman writes close to a Renaissance fondness for wordplay as well as to a contemporary expertness of observation. Her repleteness of selves (her "severals") emerges, with cheerful courage, in shimmering delicacy not susceptible to fragility, as well as in fears just painful enough to contemplate. Her pain "still bleats" as she "frets in pentameter" so that "even my fingerprints ache." Yet there's also her science, her garden, and her pluck. Precious as it is rare, the dance of her unifying and separating several selves informs this book with a truly American presence, perhaps best known to us in the iconic Howard Hawks woman-if such can be an author. If so, this book's a wise and steady, lovely pal. --Santa Fe Sentinel
 Mediocre and self-centered October 8, 2003
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I felt that Ackerman's poems were luke-warm and self-centered. A poet must be able to find universality and find a way to plug his or herself into the greater world, but Ackerman writes blandly about her psychoanalyist with little use of figurative language and sensory details. There were moments of lovely phraseology but mostly bland "telling and not showing." Often I was unable to invest myself as a reader and often wished I was able to care, but Ackerman fell short of drawing me into her experience.
Donna Seaman, Bookist September 14, 2003
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Ackerman is extraordinarily attuned to the ceaseless vibrancy of nature, the life of the mind--the source of all that is human, from our sense of self and beauty to longing and pain--and paradox: that the vital green of summer conceals the red of autumn; that something as delicate as folded paper, as ephemeral as a poem, can serve as a bridge from dark to light. In her beguiling nature writing, Ackerman is superlatively descriptive and wonderfully present. In her poetry, Ackerman's love for and command of words are even more pronounced, more daring and whimsical, and she is positively incandescent here. Ackerman explains that these spirited poems "geysered up" each day during "intense psychotherapy," and there is indeed an aura of oracular certainty about them, a unity and purity that seems drenched in the divine, and yet they're fully grounded in Ackerman's experiences: her Illinois girlhood; adventures in the wild and on the move flying, diving, and skiing; immersions in love, loss, and psychotherapy, a profoundly demanding dialogue that is at once intimate and ritualized. "Psychotherapy and lyrical poetry address many of the same issues," Ackerman observes, but, oh, what a difference art makes.
Library Journal, October 15, 2002 October 17, 2002
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
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