Ruining the Picture

By Pimone Triplett

In their unique blend of linguistic energy and stunning emotional conviction, Pimone Triplett's poems richly weave the strands of myth, culture, and history into a personal landscape of the imagination. Hers is a startling new voice in American poetry-surefooted on the page, with a dazzling richness of texture throughout.

"Pimone Triplett has a large discursive intelligenge, a keen lyric sensibility, a strong feeling for drama. . . . What an abiding pleasure to encounter a first book of such maturity." --Edward Hirsch

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810150875
• ISBN13: 9780810150874
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Triquarterly Books
• Length: 83 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Elegant, Graceful Debut

Pimone Triplett's work is well-crafted and crafty, graceful in its execution and stunning in its display of an imagination that is large and powerful. The language in these poems is beautiful, and there are poems here that make one swoon. This collection reads more like a third or fourth book; it is difficult to believe it is her first. It isn't often such a poet arrives. I suspect we will continue to see such striking work from Ms. Triplett in the future. One can only hope for such riches. // C. Dale Young, Poetry Editor, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW

Elegant poetry of form and feeling, absence and desire.

A World of Form "and " Feeling: A Eugene Poet's Debut Collection DeliversRuining the Picture by Pimone Triplett, TriQuarterly Books, 1998, 81 pages, $14.95, soft cover The poems in Pimone Triplett's Ruining the Picture with their images of calculated light, their careful studies of absence and desire will haunt you. Guaranteed. Triplett's first collection demands her readers full attention and then delivers with finely accomplished and fiercely intelligent work. There are no delineated sections or subject headings in Triplett's book to separate autobiography from mythology, or divide religious questions from those relating more explicitly to carnal desires. For the reader, the result of this borderless poemscape is that the voice of the prophetic eventually becomes one with the voice of the everyday. In this way, Triplett echoes the accomplishments of the renowned Irish poet, Eavan Boland. Both women seem to insist on the intermingling of myth and memoir, of the ordinary with the ordained. Both women take on the blockbusters of literary tradition - - The Bible, The Iliad and The Odyssey in order to infuse the female characters - Eve, Queen Dido, and Persephone with seemingly more complex roles than they enjoyed in the original telling. However it is in the smaller, more personal poems: a young woman mourning her grandfather, a daughter imagining her mother's miscarriage, a lover caught in the too bright light of morning, that a more interesting voice appears on the page. In these poems, "On Pattern," "Stillborn," "Spectral Dues," and "Portraits at the Epicenter" Triplett is at her best giving us a world of form "and " feeling. In "On Pattern" the following lines are not confined to the rituals of mourning. "the family at your death keeps to form, having to act out that love of endings.And again, in these lines: ". . It's the formal silence we love. The hush that's planned, the good answer." Poems and funerals are peculiarly similar in that they attempt to contain the uncontainable. Both construct a vessel for grief. Certain patterns of words, structures of lines, specified silences present themselves in both practices. These stanzas reverberate throughout "Ruining the Picture." Triplett is clearly concerned with a multitude of forms -- art, myth, photography, and religion. All are considered and framed in her work. There is a compulsion to see beyond the forms, to discover the spaces and silences hiding within accepted traditions and by the same token a fear of 'ruining' what Triplett keeps close to the heart with too much 'light.' In "Portraits at the Epicenter" light is again under scrutiny. The dim light of memory, the camera's flash, the overbearance of bright sun, and the grotesque bomb light of Hiroshima are all juxtaposed. Again and again these images are snapped, cut, and flashed across the page. How to hold on to memory, how to tell the st

Poems that are elegent and deeply original

Pimone Triplett's poems defy easy categorization. Perhaps this is because she allows her poetic subjects to evoke different aspects of herself. Her identity shifts as it is wed to each poem's subject through a highly idiosyncratic relationship that is, in the end, about language. If you are tired of poems that scream for attention like spoiled children, or ingratiate themselves to you like abused dogs, then here are poems whose language and musicality invite you in as an equal welcome guest and tend to your mind and heart.