This volume is a collection of poetry responding to Twombly’s artworks which is divided into four sections. It includes the following poems in section 1: “Troubled by Thoughts about Infinity and Oblivion, I Exit the Twombly Retrospective at Dusk and Walk the High Line with the Ghost of My Father,” “In Which Twombly and Rader Consider the Letter,” “Meditation on Comprehension,” “Meditation on Absolution,” “System,” “Meditation on Instruction,” “Meditation on Circulation,” “Sonnet: The Inscrutability of Influence,” “Unended Octet,” “Meditation on Revision,” “Meditation on Motion,” “Studies for Excursus,” and “Elegies (Variations).” In section II: “Meditation on Mimesis,” “The Fire That Consumes All Before It,” “Meditation on Communication,” and “Letter of Resignation.” In section III: “Octet,” “Meditation on Inspiration,” “Meditation on Revolution,” “Self-Portrait in the Dark,” “This Is No Time for Poetry,” “Meditation on Direction,” “Unfinished Unending Journey,” “Meditation on Remembering,” “Unfinished Sonnet,” “Eternal Return,” “Meditation on Creation,” “In Advance of All Parting,” “Meditation on Inscription,” and “Once Again in Thought about Rilke, Twombly's Orpheus Paintings, and Fatherhood, I Consider the Inevitability of Creation and Loss.” Section IV includes “Pentimento,” notes, and acknowledgements. Poems are interspersed with reproductions of Twombly’s works.

“Pentimento” offers prose reflections on Twombly and Rader’s process of writing the poems. Rader also discusses his father’s passing in 2017—and later his mother’s passing in 2022—as the impetus for his repeated returns to the question, “What makes a life?” (107). Rader writes that he “saw Twombly groping for meaning, relevance, connection, expression by way of two different but interrelated acts—drawing and writing. Images were not enough. Poetry was not enough” (108). He shares that the collection of poetry was driven by the “poetics of seeking” (108) he found in Twombly and expresses his interactions with the paintings and writing of the poems as a means of healing amidst grief. 

For more on artistic responses to Twombly’s practice, see also the In Perspective project. For more on Twombly’s works that are invoked and responded to in these poems, see also major retrospective catalogues and monographs, such as: Richard Leeman’s Cy Twombly: A Monograph (2005); Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (2016); Thierry Greub’s Inscriptions (2022); and Cy Twombly: Making Past Present, eds. Christine Kondoleon and Kate Nesin (2020). Recent exhibition catalogues such as Cy Twombly: Œuvres sur papier 1973–1977, Musée de Grenoble (2023), though more narrow in scope than the present volume, may also be of interest.

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly by Dean Rader. Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2023; 117 pages, fully illustrated. English.