Another wonderful book by Paul Metcalf. I'd expected this to show the signs of his old age, but I should have known that a person who praises Melville for continuing to write for forty years after the failure of Moby-Dick wouldn't produce formulaic novels at any age. As in "Genoa," the links between apparently disjunct subjects are continuously amazing.

After a chapter on the Alaska earthquake, we're plunged into an apparently entirely disconnected chapter on the symptoms of migraine. Three pages in, we're given a list of symptoms. (These are indented and double-spaced, without periods.)

an edging of light of a zigzag shape and curruscating [sic: coruscating] at right angles to its length

stars, circles, squares or squiggles, throbbing, spinning, flickering and spinning

bubbles and balloons

in a visual storm, a brilliant sand dune, the brains shimmering

A reader might notice the word "storm," and the next line makes it clear:

a road cracking up with a severe earthquake

This is a spectacular return to the descriptions of Alaskan roads breaking up in the earthquake, because given the list of migraine symptoms that has preceded it, a "road" is an entirely plausible scotoma. Suddenly the earthquake is relived, inside the reader's eye, as an abstract vision. The author's migraine, which becomes the reader's image, is a sign of the impending destruction of his consciousness, just as the earthquake destroyed Anchorage. And in retrospect, it's all set up by the last section of the preceding earthquake chapter, which is about how Houston was lifted four inches by a surface wave from the Alaska quake, 3,300 miles away. That's an analogue, a signal to the reader that distant connections will reappear.

This is only one example, one appearance of one theme. Metcalf should be required reading for all MFA students, because he takes even the most attentive reader to school, demonstrating how to make connections that aren't forced, programmatic, obvious, repetitive, awkward, or otherwise business as usual. It's real poetry, and it's no wonder that in interviews and essays, Metcalf always said that Melville wrote poetry in prose, even if his actual poetry was awful, and that people like Melville and Poe knew they were blurring the boundaries of poetry and prose. That mixture is much more powerful, to my ear, than Metcalf's mixing of historical periods and subjects, because it doesn't take the usual forms of poetry lodged in prose (as in "Paterson," Anne Carson, and many others) or prose as poetry (as in Banville, etc.). ( )