Ruining the Picture

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

Preoccupied by questions of textual transmission and corruption, the poems in this confident first collection grasp at evasive fragments of larger cultural myths, and those myths we make for ourselves. Would-be refrains break off, partial, as in the tripartite "Branch Between the Bones," where the line "Happens because he wanted to move forward," erodes to "Happened because he wanted to move," becomes, "Happened because he wanted to," and, finally, "Happened because he wanted." A strong interest in the personal narrative?located, for Triplett, in her grandfather's Bangkok?runs through several poems, adding an element of exoticism (in form as well as diction) that most often leads to the inevitable lizards and teak. More central is Triplett's strength as a crafter of dramatic monologues, akin to the brilliant classical channelings of H.D. and Louise Gluck, which comes through in mythic mainstays like "Dido to Aeneas from Below," "The Siren," "Tiresias to Penelope" and Eve's retort to the archangel in "Fractal Audition." There, the well-tread subject matter throws the boldness of these voices into bas-relief. Though the poet's Romantic wistfullness for the unrecoverable sometimes verges on sentimentality, the poems of this adroit debut restore even as they ruin, recast as they recall.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Triplett's first collection shows her to be as careful and respectful a reader of poetry, myth, and literature as one could hope for. For the most part, her influences are so openly evinced that her poems become more like homages: any writer who titles one poem "Self-Portrait as a Dream of Giving Up the Child" cannot be unconscious of Jorie Graham's many poem titles beginning "Self-Portrait as...." There is something of the dense intellection of James Merrill and Eleanor Wilner in her attention to mythological creatures, and the strong influence of Richard Howard is clear in her poems on the composer Berlioz's wife and the biologist Linnaeus. Though she seems not yet to have found her own subject and stance, Triplett is a poet of subtle elegance?her Mary calls the angel of the Annunciation "a blade's grate, a treble bristling in `subito,'/ an arch, an angel, an echo ordering my life"?who is well worth watching. For most collections strong in contemporary literature.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.