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Ruining the Picture

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A World of Form "and " Feeling: A Eugene Poet's Debut Collection Delivers

Ruining 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 story, frame the photo, are questions posed without any comfort of answers. In "Stillborn," perhaps the most emotionally charged poem of the collection, the narrator re-tells the story of her mother's stillborn child, "the phantom child you also would have named Pimone." The voice is equal parts rage and despair, a wounded cry begun before birth.

"I wish we could tell one another what it is the stubborn flesh asks of us. For now all the issue I can offer is to dedicate the silence of this night to you and the shadow child that wasn't let to swim for the shore of his own voice the one who taught how little you could get from the botched scrawl of matter ..." Sometimes silence is the best we can do. And yet the craving for communication remains, even if it is only scrawled matter, even if it is 'only' inscribed in the formal beauty of poems such as these. In "Ruining the Picture" we are introduced to an agile and adept new voice. A poet we can expect to hear more from. Pimone Triplett teaches in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon.

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

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.

Pimone Triplett's poetry is like a really beautiful, really smart girl you fall for...at first you are so in awe of her beauty and the wonderful things she says and does that nothing else matters. Then you realize that you don't understand most of the things she says, but she's still so beautiful and they are wonderful things she's saying. Then you realize you're not really connecting with her well, though maybe you're learning something by being around her.

You know how it goes. Eventually, you have to break it off, because you're just not right for each other. You're not really relating, you're just pretending for the sake of beauty and profundity. It might work for someone more beautiful and smarter than you are, but you need someone more on your level.

It was fun while it lasted, you learned some stuff, but definitely not your best love.