drama

Paul Metcalf has been published by small presses. His work is now collected in three volumes in the Coffee House Press. This is volume one. The works are arranged in chronological order. The book is Whitmanesque in the sense that it is so American, so filled with American people and American geography.

The first part is WILL WEST about a Cherokee ball player. Will West goes to his mother to tell her he has quit the ball team and that he has killed a woman. She gives him the money he has sent to her to escape punishment. This work and the others in the volume consists of both poetry and prose. The story moves from Will and his traveling with a truck driver named Ferd to the Civil War and De Soto the Spanish explorer.

The work GENOA follows. We are in the city of Indianapolis, Crawford County. In the past Indiana was probably a rank lush swamp. Metcalf cites and quotes the works and biography of his ancestor, Herman Melville.

The narrator's brother Carl died in the electric chair. Michael Mills is a nonpracticing physician, a house husband. This work, as is the case with the previous one and others in this volume, has a mixed media feel to it, something virtually homespun. The work of Metcalf, as Melville's, is filled with medical lore, sea lore, scientific lore, and explorers' tales.

Carl Mills went to Alaska, to Spain to fight with the Loyalists, to China to participate in World War II in the RAF where he was put into a Japanese POW camp and tortured. The history of Christopher Columbus is used in GENOA. Columbus and Melville were both men of vision.

Carl ended up in St. Louis at the center of things. The narrator visited him and found him reading THE CONFIDENCE MAN. Carl said later in a mental hospital quoting that work that a sick philosopher is incurable.

A portion on Theodore Dreiser reminds me of USA, John Dos Passos. The crime resulting in the execution is a combination of fiction and history. GENOA and the latter sections in the volume have bibliographies. GENOA, in the collage-like use of materials, resembles EXECUTIONER'S SONG and leaves the reader with the same sadness.

PATAGONI is the third work of the collection. As indicated by the title it is a derivation of the place name Patagonia. We visit the world presented to explorers of the Amazon and the Andes. Henry Ford is a character in PATAGONI. The work owes a nod to William Carlos Williams, mentioned, and his poem PATERSON. Sialia is Indian for bluebird, the name of Ford's yacht.

The next section is the MIDDLE PASSAGE, and the final one is called APALACHE. They concern for the most part and in great detail North America. An exception is a wonderful treatment of the Luddite Riots. In terms of time one moves from geological pre-human history through Eric the Red and Roger Williams and Blackstone, dissenters from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to the Civil Rights Movement.

Paul Metcalf is a master of his craft. Where have I been, I ask myself, to have not encountered his work earlier.