Matthew Thorburn, Subject to Change (Western Michigan University Press, 2004), pbk, 73pp., $14.00.

     In his high-spirited debut, Matthew Thorburn includes a poem, “Variations,” which is divided into three sections, each containing three stanzas separated by the conjunction ‘or,’ as if to offer the reader a range of choices for which poem they’d like to consume. The result is not unlike a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, or a menu at a restaurant which lets you construct your own meal. This playful interactivity is representative of the enchanting, inventive spirit of the collection as a whole.

     In keeping with this inventive spirit, I offer here three variations on the controlling metaphor of Matthew Thorburn’s Subject to Change:


I. A River

     The poems in this, Thorburn’s first collection, are rife with twists, shifts, and ox-bows. They begin as though attempting to address concerns of the physical world, but immediately undermine this seeming aim and retreat into language, propelling themselves via puns the way a river sometimes beats things back with its own current.

     Some pieces are actually about rivers—or at least they appear to be—as is the case with the first poem, “The Critics Interrupt Their Interpretations of ‘Un Chat en Hiver’ for a French Lesson.” In a way, this poem is an ars poetica concerned with what art means and does, and how we fail or succeed to ‘get’ it. It begins: “‘A cat in the river,’ she mused—half-right. ‘Like us, / a little thing in a place wilder than what we can control. / Rather like life, no?” The piece ends with our heroine


  ...thumbing through a dictionary. ‘Shit,’
  she said. ‘It’s a cat in winter. The river’s just what we imagined
  it to be, only it’s not there. And a cat in winter…I’m not sure
  what that’s like.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s not so bad,’
  and the snow fell all night like shredded photocopies of snow
  on a thin white cat.


     This flow of meanings and interpretations seems inexorable, as though—as Thorburn writes in “Coda: Where the River Runs”—there is “nothing I can say to make it stop.” And because the ride downstream is so engaging, you don’t want him to.


II. A Baroque Musical Composition

     Thorburn elaborates on each chosen theme until, at times, it’s almost too much, too clever, at which point he reins it in and brings it back to its central melody. As with the Baroque musical style, Thorburn uses minute and at times eccentric detail to create drama, exuberance, and tension. I invoke the term “baroque” quite apart from its occasionally derogatory connotations, as Thorburn’s work is neither excessive or obscure—but rather complex, mischievous, and energetic.

     Subject to Change deftly employs point and counterpoint, and masterfully manipulates rhythm, time, and sound. In “Jim & John,” for instance (which looks like this)
 

Wherever I go		I go too
a contortionist’s act		every time, and if we dance
we dance together, too		many legs, too few
arms (we’ve got just two)		to share)
I stepped on someone’s toe,		but whose? We’re a couple in search
of a couple. No use whispering		to a woman, I’d love to be alone
With you? She’s too busy thinking—		wondering? Shuddering?—
But they must bathe together,		dress together; can’t undress
Him without him naked too.		Or He couldn’t hug me without…
Yes, I’d have half
The hugging to do.

                        
Thorburn has written a poem about conjoined twins and codependency which is both funny and sad, and which can be read any one of three ways: once with just John, once with just Jim, and then, once again, with both—point and counterpoint—together.


III. A Name Game

     Bricolaged and referential in the extreme, Thorburn’s poems deftly list the names of famous figures—past and present—to advance their meaning. In the single-sentence sonnet, “Plunky’s Lament,” he writes:
         
          …what I’d give for McDuff’s mini-Moog
          (black keys white, white black), a tight-miked hi-hat,
          and to be ax man enough to pick a peck

          of notes hip as these wack noodlings (dirty fugue,
          banjo funk?), even if I can’t say for sure what
          I’m hearing’s  Béla Fleck, not that other fella, Beck.

     This is likely one of the most over-the-top examples, yet throughout Subject to Change the reader is given references to Seurat, Mozart, Steve Martin, Sting, Fairfield Porter, Li Po, Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Duchamp, and “Yeats: Ben Bulben, and the Lake Isle of …‘Guinness Free?’” to name just a very, very few.

     That said, Thorburn’s poems are not overly ludic—he does not sacrifice depth of feeling in the interest of sheer fun. Even in his sestinas—a form on occasion superficial and exclusively rule-driven—he manages to convey emotional sincerity. In “Just You, Just Me,” for instance—a sestina employing the end words begin, justice, two, hours, new, and blue—he tells the story of the speaker and Sally, young and in love and about to embark on their new life together with great imagination: “Tonight we make believe. Sally says, ‘You be gin / and tonic, no lime; I’ll be a strawberry daiquiri or two / fingers of Glenfiddich in a very cold glass—crystal, light blue.”

     Bringing together elements which are diverse—yet never too disparate—the four sections of Subject to Change fit together nicely, one reason Thorburn is able to create the overall effect, with this first collection, of a musical river full of people with famous names. You should jump in.

                                                                             — Kathleen Rooney