This plays out most effectively in “Logic,” in which “The body / puts glue on a twig and catches a bird. Is this an admission of guilt? But “truth doesn't count / in law, only proof.” The maddening question remains: What constitutes proof and where are we to find it?Īn exploration of tools and their functions is a further steady preoccupation as Siken seeks something definitive and concrete to, perhaps literally, hold onto.

Siken considers the painting of Caravaggio's own face on Goliath's severed head as a reference to his potential murder sentence. Allegedly.” The analysis of Caravaggio, a “thug whose soul / was as big as Rome and full of anvils,” is more complex. The events of Raphael's Saint George and the Dragon are recounted and then routinely devalued by the spare statement that “All these things happened. The Picasso is his portrait of Gertrude Stein, but is the image an adequate likeness? More importantly, he wonders, can the painting tell us something about Stein as a person? “She existed enough to be painted” is the reluctant conclusion.

Immediately following, “Three Proofs” attacks the problem from a more academic perspective, as the poet considers paintings by Picasso, Raphael, and Caravaggio. The effort ends in an artfully admitted defeat, “I turned off the headlights of / my looking and let the animal get away.” “The Museum” addresses the chasm of the other that cannot be breached in allegorical fashion a man stands before a painting, fixated by something unnameable: “Perhaps it was something about yellow / near pink,” while his disinterested lover waits nearby, yet a world away. The personal nature of this artistic seeking is most evident in the poem “Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light,” in which Siken's attempt to paint his subject, presumably a lover, begins with the troubled assessment “There is something terribly wrong with his face-” before launching into a brilliant description of an uncapturable beauty: “his eyes shine like wedding rings.” In this case, the inability to provide an exact portrayal is a proxy for the actual problem, the inability to truly know another person. To make something / beautiful should be enough. Siken sets this conversation in motion from the book's opening line: “The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects, / so what's there to be faithful to?” The trappings of aesthetics are insufficient: “It should be enough.

The erotic energy and dazzling infatuation that drove Crush are replaced in War of the Foxes with frustrations about the impossibility of creating pure and true artistic representations. Richard Siken's second collection, coming a decade after his Yale Younger Poets prize-winning debut Crush, finds the poet a subdued man with more mature preoccupations.

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