Putting Down the Brush Review: War of the Foxes Mitchell Layton Richard Siken Poetry Copper Canyon Press, pp.49 Cost: $17 |
Most of Siken’s poems seem to be self-reflecting, riddled with abstractions and rhetorical questions. He yearns to untie “the knot of the self,” as quoted from his poem, “Glue,” looking at his own writing, his own art, his own life and mentality. It is soul searching in its finest display of craft. Profound attempts to answer profound questions. Siken could be questioning his own existence and his own method of life. “Why live a life? Well, why are you asking?” The very process of writing seems to be the answer to his questions.
At first, the birds are described as something beautiful, something worthy of being painted and treasured. But Siken asks, “Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all?” These once beautiful birds are now questionably meaningless. Later he writes, “Close the blinds and kill the birds” in his poem “Self-Portrait against Red Wallpaper.” Where the birds once represented beauty and freedom, that freedom is surrendered and the birds find their lethal end. While some characters come in the form of animals and could represent nature, life, beauty, etc., others, like the ghost, come as a representation of mortality or pain. Siken asks, “What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. Something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead.” The ghosts continue to haunt his poems along with the weight of death and internal reflection. The repetition of characters and the ideas they stand for makes them familiar by the end, an ongoing concept for Siken and the reader. The worms appear frequently, and Siken writes, “The birds eat worms.” He uses the images of his characters to show a battle between good and evil, beauty and pain, happiness and sadness. The characters could be literal, or they could be extensions of Siken’s thoughts, the worms buried in his mind, the birds flying amongst his brain.
Siken often describes these characters as works of art, in addition to being works of poetry. His interest in art and the concept of paint are woven throughout the entire book, often emerging as a sort of additional character: an inanimate object that’s personified and repeated to become a prominent figure. Many poems show imagery of creating and destroying with paint. The first poem, titled “The Way the Light Reflects” enters with “The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects, / so what’s there to be faithful to? I am faithful / to you, darling. I say it to the paint.” Siken remains faithful to the paint throughout the book, returning to the concepts of art and creation and making references to several artists. The paint is the blood of War of the Foxes, pumping into every poem, giving life to the characters within, and becoming a character in itself.
War of the Foxes is meaningful and inquisitive. Siken digs to uncover more about himself by uncovering his art, the questions he has, and the characters in his mind. He writes of art, life, death, war, and love. In Siken’s writing, art and poetry become one. The characters he creates, whether it be in art or in poetry, become almost like friends in the end; familiar faces from which to build from. He paints words and creates images to discover the meaning behind his art, behind war and love. “What does all this love amount to? Putting down the brush for the last time—“