Echo's Errand

Mary Jacobus, in Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, a book about the relationship between poetry and Twombly’s artwork, writes: “Twombly practices the poetics of incompleteness, drawing on the survivals and fragments of the past, and allowing the reader to project meaning onto textual lacunae and gaps.” The finely tuned short lines of Echo’s Errand, the debut poetry collection by scholar and poet Keith Jones, present an original engagement with Twombly’s painting and sculpture, one that echoes Twombly’s “poetics of incompleteness,” both in their spare and subtle lyricism and in their investigation of the past. Specifically, Jones makes a connection between Twombly’s depictions of the ancient Mediterranean, or “Middle Sea,” and the horrors of the transportation of enslaved peoples across the Atlantic, or the “Middle Passage.” At times, Jones’s lines evoke the palimpsestic scrawl in some of Twombly’s paintings, unfurling across the page as they would across a seascape littered with the flotsam of collective memory, as in this section from the long poem, “Shade of, Bound to You”:

        “X”   where the middle sea began   swimmer not yet free
a wind forever panting   perishing   final facts   there
        where myth went
massive   what the page won’t take   weary of its own echo

The speaker in “Blown Rake of Tears” evokes Xenophon’s Anabasis—an ancient military chronicle that Twombly referenced multiple times—while grieving losses caused by systemic abuses of power in the United States of the 1960s. In the “swirling loss / ten thousand / men, attuned / to the void […],” we find “war’s inexhaustible echo,” which reverberates in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that resulted in the deaths of “‘four Black girls,’” and in Vietnam:

            napalm, cruel mounds
where the heart-wrench
            is, where wrong
is, where wrong 
            lies in fields
& seas, un-
            Buried

In Echo’s Errand, Jones also draws on texts by Jacques Derrida, Kamau Brathwaite, Jay Wright, Paul Celan, and others, in poems that move from “dire wistful” to “the chiaroscuro / of intimate.”