Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire

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

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.

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.

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.

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.