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Title: Origami Bridges : Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire by Diane Ackerman ISBN: 0-06-019988-1 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.57 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Precious as It is Rare
Comment: 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
Rating: 5
Summary: Santa Fe Sentinel review
Comment: 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
Rating: 2
Summary: Mediocre and self-centered
Comment: 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.
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Title: I Praise My Destroyer : Poems by Diane Ackerman ISBN: 0679771344 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 10 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman ISBN: 0679735666 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 10 September, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Natural History of Love : Author of the National Bestseller A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman ISBN: 0679761837 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 21 February, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Jaguar of Sweet Laughter : New and Selected Poems by Diane Ackerman ISBN: 0679743049 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 27 July, 1993 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Rhapsody in Plain Yellow: Poems by Marilyn Chin ISBN: 0393324532 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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