Product Description

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 present emotional 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1136267 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-25
• Released on: 2003-10-06
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

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.

From Booklist
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. Donna Seaman
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