Much like his great-grandfather, Herman Melville, Paul Metcalf brings an extraordinary diversity of material into the complex patterns of analogy and metaphor, to affect a common term altogether brilliant in its imagination. In succeeding works The Middle Passage , Apalache , Waters of Potowmack , and Firebird , Metcalf originated a genre of fiction which includes a montage of historic New World documentation mixed with poetry, an original mode of imaginative composition. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California San Diego, SUNY at Albany, and the University of Kansas. The clutch of fact and fiction, the coherence Metcalf manages in setting one thing beside another. . The voice is authentic and piercing.
Book has a musical and topological quality . .
The Phoenix Apalache and The Middle Passage - Apalache is a highly individual vision of America. The Village Voice One of the most unique voices . . . Middle Passages belongs to our communal history. . . It is moving and it teaches.