I Praise My Destroyer: Poems by Diane Ackerman

From the Publisher

In her first new book of poetry since Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman combines her deep understanding of the world with her immense passion for language to craft richly sensual poems that "honor all life/wherever and in whatever form/it may deal."

Imbued with ravishing imagery, these exuberant and lyrical explorations of aging, longing, and death demonstrate Ackerman's full engagement with every aspect of life's process. Ackerman muses on the confines of therapy sessions, where she intersects "twice a week/in a painstaking hide-and-seek/making do with half-light, half-speak"; relishes the succulent pleasure of eating an apricot, with its "gush of taboo sweetness"; and imagines the "unupholstered voice, a life in outline" in her stunning elegy to C. S. Lewis. Whimsical, organic, and wise, the poems in I Praise My Destroyer affirm Ackerman's place as one of the most enchanting poets writing today.

KLIATT

In her title piece, Ackerman expresses themes that appear throughout the collection in these lines: "How can it all end,/spring white in the dogwoods,/sunset's purple rigging/bellied high over the horizon/mating lizards in the yard, and sailboats on the lake/-both with bubble throats?" The impermanence of life, both the drama and quiet beauty of nature, and the need to experience it all; these are all preoccupations of Ackerman's, both in her prose works on the environment and in her poetry. She speaks from the experience, whether watching cabbage moths or working on a cattle ranch. Although Ackerman displays her extensive vocabulary, especially those words gleaned from study of the natural world, she sometimes fails to reach for the profound or unique expression of an emotion or idea, sometimes settling for cliché. In "We Die," a heartfelt tribute to astronomer Carl Sagan, she dilutes her grief by resorting to platitudes like: "Life is not fair, the old saw goes." Or else the metaphor is a stretch, as in "The Sorrow Rangers," which, in addition to being too general, does not work to convey the powerlessness we sometimes feel when experiencing sorrow. Still, Ackerman's poems are important because they speak the emotions we find hard to express, both the sorrow of loss and the celebration of life. She enjoys language. One of my favorites is "Pyrrhic," a poem about letting go, literally letting nature take its course. She teaches us new words: "onion thrip," "wall-rue fern." She's also playful, even writing one piece, a tribute to cats, in Middle English. Often her experiments in language do work, as in more extended pieces where she has a chance to use her descriptivetalents in setting a scene, as in her longest piece, "Cantos Vaqueros," a love song to a Mexican cowboy. But she takes a bit too long to come to the point of her poem—that this hard physical work she does with them takes her out of a mind too busy with words. Ackerman is a writer who should be read, either her prose or poetry, because of her insistence on the necessity of humans to glory in the world that we often have little time to experience, both in its minutiae and its vastness. Her poems are accessible and provocative even if not as masterful as some. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1998, Random House/Vintage, 114p, 21cm, 97-34464, $12.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Sue E. Budin; YA Libn., Ann Arbor P.L., Ann Arbor, MI January 2001 (Vol. 35 No. 1)

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Diane Ackerman: I am delighted to be with you this evening.

Diane Ackerman: Austin is the home of Bat Conservation International...No, poetry reflects the heart and soul of the people. That is as much true today as it was in the 19th century. It continues to help us understand the human condition better, our relationships, the panorama of emotions that we have inherited. Throughout the world and in the U.S., poetry continues to be a vitally important art form.

Diane Ackerman: All artists find it a challenge to make sense of a three-dimensional world in two dimensions or in something as abstract as music. But through the alchemy of art it is possible to see how art touches us. Language is human made, and how on earth can we use it to understand emotion? That is the great challenge for a writer. One way is to try to find the best metaphors, similes, images, etc. that in combination will overlap the empty space in between the words, that will help map the kingdom of human emotions and ideas; especially for the places where we don't have a workable vocabulary.

Diane Ackerman: Every day I make time to go out biking through the countryside. Usually the bike rides last about an hour. I try during that time to empty my mind of frets, worries, mind theaters, the talk radio station in the brain -- in short, all of the commotion of life -- and turn a bike ride into a form of active meditation. Biking is a great way to doodle at speed, live in the moment, and enjoy the sensations of being alive. That usually clears mmy mind enough that when I return, I am ready to let my mind fill up again. I am ready to be inspired. I think a nature walk would work as well.

Diane Ackerman: My muse is very miscellaneous. I may be setting out to write about the Antarctic or who the men really were who ended up at the Alamo, or the discovery of electricity, etc. and discover a certain amount of emotional spillage that needs to find form in a poem, that somehow doesn't belong in an essay, so that is one way that some of the poems come about. At other times, I might be just walking down the street, say, and see two people engaged in conversation, and something about the expression on their faces or a gesture that one makes might be powerful or unforgettable, but I am not exactly sure why. So I will jot it down in a notebook. Later it may may well prompt a poem when the importance of the observation becomes clear to me. Sometimes, life's events just send words down my spine. For example, in I PRAISE MY DESTROYER, there is a poem I write to Carl Sagan after his death. Carl had been a friend for almost 30 years, and even after I knew he was ill for some time, his death still came as a shock. There is another poem,"When the Deep Purple Falls," which is a 1,000-word sentence about biking around Otsego Lake in the lavender hours of the morning. In the summer, I often bike with a girlfriend, whom the book is dedicated to, and in these long bike trips, we solve all the problems of the world. That was true on that beautiful purple morning as well, and when the biking was over I found my imagination still in motion, so I sat down and wrote the poem.

Diane Ackerman: I haven't stopped writing nature essays. It is just that I love the idea of introducing children to nature. They are children's versions of two adult essays that I wrote, one on monk seals and one on bats. When I go out on expeditions, I am the camera, and I find that taking photos distracts me from focusing in a verbal way on the adventure that is unfolding, so I return home with word pictures, but no photos unless a photographer is with me, like when a National Geographic photographer joined me. It is especially fun to create children's books in which photos can accompany the text. In the case of BATS, the text is a short, modified version of the essay "In Praise of Bats," which appears in THE MOON BY WHALE LIGHT. However, Merlin Tuttle's extraordinary photos of bats accompany the text.

Diane Ackerman: I had the great privilege and delight of knowing Carl for almost 30 years. He was on my doctoral committee. Indeed, having him on that committee made it possible for me to work on both the arts and the sciences. My first book was THE PLANETS: A COSMIC PASTORAL, a book of poems based on the science (rather than astrology) of the planets, and Carl generously agreed to be the technical adviser for the book. That was in the early '70s in the innocence of the space program. At a time when it was possible to learn everything that people knew about the planets. Since then so much info has poured in that the task would be a lot harder.

Diane Ackerman: It has been six years since JAGUAR OF SWEET LAUGHTER came out. Between then I have been publishng prose books. Sometimes it is difficult for me to choose whether a poem will be put in a prose book as a prose poem or whether a poem will attain its autonomy and find its way into a collection of poems, but probably the main reason that it has been so long is simply that my contract with Random House since JAGUAR has been for a number of books, only one of which could be a collection of poems.

Diane Ackerman: Thank you for your kind and encouraging words. Books get written in a solitary mania, in small rooms, staring at blank sheets of paper, and an author doesn't know if they will touch someone. In answer to your question, sometimes I get to choose the cover. But more times than not I get to revise the cover. In the case of this cover, which I agree is very beautiful, I was able to have certain elements of it altered so it would look the way it does now. Bu the original photo and color the designer at Random House chose. I think all his books have been very wonderful. I am lucky that the disgns for all the jackets have been so wonderful.

Diane Ackerman: Unfortunately, I didn't study poetry in high school, and I grew up in a time when teachers encouraged students to make trees with realistic colors, they didn't encourage creativity. I think their motives were wonderful, they wanted kids to be as normal as possible and fit in. But now I know that students are encouraged to be creative, and they are offered wonderful works to read, and art is a dignified, respected profession. Many of these students I see as college students who already have a good background in literature and a skill in writing, so bless you for your work. When I was a college freshman I began reading poetry, and my favorites were Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and Walt Whitman. I wouldn't necessarily recommend them for high school students. Here is one that you might like, a novelist friend of mine, Jeanne Mackin, and I recently edited a Norton anthology, THE BOOK OF LOVE, which contains about 700 pages of writings about love in different genres, and I've got a hunch that high school students might enjoy learning about poetry if it also was about romance.

Diane Ackerman: No, I think musicians are the modern-day musicians. It must be wonderful to be born into a world of sound. Most poets I know would love to be composers, but most composers I know would also love to be poets. Each of the art forms stakes out its territory and has unique contributions to make to our understanding of what our spectacle of art is all about. I don't see the two overlapping, except to the extent that there have been times in history when poems have mainly been sung, and humpback whales use rhyme to remember their longer songs.

Diane Ackerman: I have great admiration for fiction. But I think of it as a very high-class form of lying. If you ask me to describe a rose and spin off ideas about it and the psychology of the people who love roses for 300 to 400 pages, I will happily oblige, but if you ask me what a woman crossing a room did before I saw her I have trouble coming up with an answer. I don't have a fiction writer's sense. However, I am married to the fiction writer Paul West (his latest novel is TERRESTRIALS). Our creative habits are similar in many ways but compleley different in other ways.

Diane Ackerman: I am very optimistic about the future. We still have a lot of distance to cover before we become responsible stewards of nature, and it is a shame that we are better able to transform the world than to understand it. We happen to be at the top of the food chain, buy we jumped the line. Other animals can't keep up with us. All of that is a shame. However, what encourages me is how concerned we are, how concerned even children are about the future of the natural world. When I talk with teens and elementary school kids, I don't need to inspire them about nature, they already have summer volunteer jobs working with the environment and a determination to make a difference. I find that extremely hopeful. We must continue fighting this battle. We must be vigilant, but I think in the end we will prevail.

Diane Ackerman: This book of poetry is divided into five books: one section about love, one about life and death, one section contains natural history poems, one section is set on a cattle ranch where I had signed on for a year, and one is about psychotherapy. Timed talk is a "metaphor" I use for the therapy hour.

Diane Ackerman: I am a grat fan of the Universe. All of it interests me, and it interests me in detail, so for me there is no separation bewteen science and nature. It all happens on the same continuum. In one sense the Grand Canyon is the same as the great wilderness of the city. All of it is nature. All of it is how life on our planet expresses itself. So I love studying animals, but of course humans are my favorite animal. In a book like A SLENDER THREAD, out in Vintage paperback, I write about nature and human nature, science , technology, the dark night of the soul and the daily lives of squirrels. In my mind all those things fit together.

Diane Ackerman: I would just like to wish you all a sweet and sunny spring.

Read an Excerpt

WE DIE
--for Carl Sagan

We die despite appointments and feuds,
while our toddler,
who recently learned to say No,
opens and shuts drawers
a hundred times a day
and our teen braces
for the rapids of romance.

We die despite the contracts
and business trips we planned,
when our desk is untidy,
despite a long list of things to do
which we keep simmering
like a pot of rich broth.

We die despite work we cherish,
marrying whom we love,
piling up a star-spangled fortune,
basking on the Riviera of fame,
and achieving, that human participle
with no known object.

Life is not fair, the old saw goes.
We know, we know, but the saw glides slow,
one faint rasp, and then at length another.
When you died, I felt its jagged teeth rip.
Small heartwounds opened and bled,
closing as new ones opened ahead.
Horror welled, not from the how but the when.

You died at the top of your career,
happy, blessed by love, still young.
Playing by evolution's rules, you won:
prospered, bred, rose in your tribe,
did what the parent gods and society prized.

Yet it didn't save you, love or dough.
Even when it happens slow, it happens fast,
and then there's no tomorrow.
Time topples, the castle of cards collapses,
thoughts melt, the subscription lapses.
What a waste of life we spend in asking,
in wish and worry and want and sorrow.

A tall man, you lie low, now and forever
complete, your brilliant star eclipsed.
I remember our meeting, many gabfests ago,
at a crossroads of moment and mind.
In later years, touched by nostalgia,
I teased: "I knew you when
you were just a badly combed scientist."
With a grin, you added: "I knew you when
you were just a fledgling poet."

Lost friend, you taught me lessons
I longed to learn, and this final one I've learned
against my will: the one spoken in silence,
warning us to love hard and deep,
clutch dear ones tighter, ransom each day,
the horror lesson I saw out of the corner of my eye
but refused to believe until now: we die.