Sundress Reads: Review of String

In String (LSU Press, 2023), Matthew Thorburn chronicles a teenage boy’s journey through an unnamed war. Thorburn brings a breathless quality to the entire volume, with almost no punctuation in any poem. Lines break randomly in the middle of sentences and phrases. Concrete poems seemingly resemble nothing while still floating strangely on the page. Disorientation and urgency ring all throughout Thorburn’s poetry collection,.

String is divided into four parts, each one roughly corresponding to the narrator’s experience of this war. Part 1 depicts the happy life before the war alongside the anxiety as war looms and Part 2 describes the devastation of living in a war zone. After beginning with rich, nostalgic narratives, Thorburn plunges unexpectedly into violence in, mirroring the way that conflict envelops civilian homes. In “They,” Thorburn creates the idea of a generic, violent “them” consisting of soldiers who “liked to throw things” such as “a woman down a well” (11). After establishing a serene, happy setting, Thorburn destroys any sense of security the characters possess and depicts the awful descent into chaos that occurs for the victims of conflict.

Thorburn’s outright refusal to name who or what is happening forces us into the lived experiences of conflict. We never learn what war or what part of the war String occurs in. We have no semblance of timeline or how long these characters suffer, nor how long the conflict itself endures. We aren’t allowed to think about politics or death tolls; the ideologies of any single side blends into a single wave of violence that falls upon the narrators’ home. Thorburn focuses us entirely on a single life and the devastation that war inflicts on that life. String is a deeply emotional, personal book in a place that seeks to rob its inhabitants of any sentimentality.

Part 3 guides the reader through the narrator’s choice to leave his home. Consisting of a single extended poem, this section investigates the string which ties the narrator not only to the people who love him, but to the past and present. Over the course of the poem, his string takes the form of a fuse, soldiers’ razor wire, a cursive line, and even an umbilical cord (Thorburn 43-54). This string represents the hold that the narrator holds on his world over the course of this conflict, as well as the sense of self that he maintains during his displacement. As he notes, “this string / I follow / and follow and / know I can / never stop” (Thorburn 52). This moors him to the present and past, but also tugs him relentlessly into an uncertain future; to end the collection, Part 4 investigates what it means to come back to one’s home after war.

String is not only about the disorientation that inhabitants of a warzone (and refugees) feel, but also about the way that comfort morphs in a war-stricken environment. Pianos, for example, are a symbol of comfort early in the book through depictions of the narrator’s family and friends playing together, and he revisits pianos in later poems as a way to show how comfort can rupture in times of war. After a bomb strikes, the narrator recalls how:

When the narrator’s physical home is obliterated, his mental comfort is as well. Perhaps no poem encapsulates this as well as “Shatterings,” which in part catalogs Uncle Albert (who was previously skilled on the piano)’s stroke. After the stroke, a gorgeous flow of notes becomes “a stutter of / knots nots notes nights / and days” (Thorburn 33). Much like war, the stroke turns order into disorder, blowing to pieces what made so much sense before.

Thorburn’s narrator can never really escape in spite of scattered efforts to either lighten the mood or escape reality entirely. Even as the narrator’s family friend tells him that “those wishing to sing / will always find a song,” the narrator recognizes that “only he spoke” (Thorburn 13). The narrator’s mother remains terrified in that scene as onlookers are completely unmoved by this man’s display of security. In another scene, the diversion of a magic show is repeatedly interrupted by war-related details like “the splintered tree out back,” bringing readers back to the painful reality of conflict (Thorburn 17). Reflecting on an old photograph of the narrator’s father, Thorburn remarks:

String as a whole is the narrator’s “cardboard little square,” the fleck of memory and hope he intends to pass on to the next generation.

All through his book, Thorburn is painfully aware of the frailty of nostalgia, the weaknesses present in any recollection. In language rich with horror and hope, Thorburn truthfully renders the human costs of war through the eyes of a single teenager.

String is available from Louisiana State University Press

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Scott Sorensen is a junior at Dartmouth College studying English while performing standup, writing for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern satire magazine, and helping edit the Stonefence Review. Scott dreams of becoming the first Latvian man to win an MMA championship, which is pretty unlikely given the fact that he is not Latvian and has no idea how to fight.