Corvus. Tim Metcalf. Ginninderra Press.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Tim Metcalf was born in Melbourne in 1961. He graduated in medicine from Melbourne University in 1984, and in literature from Deakin University in 1995. Metcalf has worked as a flying doctor; in rural psychiatry; and in general practice and emergency medicine. Metcalf has been publishing poetry since 1988. Corvus, his first book of poetry, was published in 2001. It features ‘Stages of Dying’ which won the 2000 WBYeats Prize. An extract from this prize-winning poem reads:
sorrow
Was it happy, his final memory?
This poor bloke, purple-faced
and next in line for death?
I was naïve, yesterday,
regarding his broken heart.
Today it wouldn’t go any more.
Tonight I was drunk.
There were tears, briefly.
Metcalf makes a pertinent point that a doctor can also suffer pain after dealing with a patient. In ‘The Red Centre’, Metcalf has no patients:
III
All the irritating details
you wanted to escape
confront you: a flat expanse.
There are two choices:
red sand or blue sky;
you or yourself.
The utilisation of colours works well. Also, ‘you’ and ‘yourself’ is clever. In ‘Waterhole’, the poet also works in tercets:
A skink drops
like a stone
from the rock.
Its glass eye
fused black by
the sun’s fire
does not blink.
No ripple
disturbs the
waterhole
still gazing
at the sky.
Metcalf’s usage of three syllables per line is deft. Metcalf is also conscious of syllables in another poem (‘Western District haiku’):
Looking for haiku –
corellas scratch in the earth
and screech in the sky.
The language in the first line is direct. The consonance of ‘scratch’ and ‘screech’ is nifty. ‘Vintage cars’ is a nifty poem (and it is for Rebecca):
I stop to watch the vintage cars go past.
I’m glad there are people who care enough
to shine them up, to lovingly preserve our heritage;
but I’ve never been the nostalgic type.
I’d rather race Ruby Sue (our Subaru)
up our rutted road, bang her springs
on roots and corrugations:
give her a damn good hammering
like I gave Dad’s Morris back in ‘sixty-three
when I was two, and he lay underneath it clanking
the diff with a spanner, and I helped on the panels
with the hammer he left gleaming in the sun.
In Metcalf’s second quatrain, there is the wit of calling his Subaru ‘Ruby Sue’. In the third quatrain, there is the vivid memory of working on a car with his Dad.
In addition to being a mechanic in his youth, Metcalf is a poet. In addition to being a poet, he is also a doctor. Being a doctor gives him something to write about. His poetry has clarity. There is also his variety of subject matter. Also, he can conceptualise as well as write about his own thoughts and feelings. And the poems vary from four page poems, from the deaths of a dog and some people, to haiku. Metcalf is good at haiku and the rest of Corvus is good too.
Michael Byrne 