Collected Works, Volume One: 1956-1976

Perhaps it is the fate of voices in advance of their time--think of Whitman, Poe, Dickinson, Dreiser, Melville--to be lost in their own. Such is the case with Metcalf--significantly enough, a great-grandson of the author of Moby-Dick--a man now in his 80s living quietly in Massachusetts. Although long admired by poets and by prose experimenters like Guy Davenport and William Gass, Metcalf has been published only in small editions and chapbooks by some very small presses. This first volume in a three-volume effort from Coffee House promises to give a lifetime's innovative work wider exposure and a shot at the posterity it deserves. Metcalf's range of experimentation is vast. ""Will West"" is a precocious piece documenting the loves and travails of a Cherokee southpaw pitcher who hits the American road. ""Genoa"" is a spectacular confrontation with Melville's work, the journals of Columbus and molecular biology--all folded into a hallucinatory narrative about two brothers and their different paths through the American century. ""Patagoni,"" ""Apalache"" and ""The Middle Passage"" round out the volume, each in its own way breaking new ground. Metcalf has a style all his own, constantly and restlessly renewing itself, utilizing primary source material, poetry, musical notation and straight narrative. His seems a writing career that, perhaps, needed a certain obscurity in order to remain so boldly adventurous, very much in the manner of Melville. Both explorer and archivist, Metcalf maps an invaluable literary landscape, unrestrained by any form or geography. At last, it is open to the general public. (Oct.)