Cut to the Word By Tim Metcalf, Charnwood: Ginninderra Press, 2002, 64 pages, paperback, $18.00. Reviewed by Sue Bond in the June 2003 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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It feels like a punch, that's all.
We all say that
when we're knifed in the heart.
Our body's just a punching bag.
One stab is fatal most times,
but everyone in this poem survived.
All of us were badly hurt.
(from 'The heart: a knife in every chamber', p 12) This first poem of Tim Metcalf's is clever and robust. It is divided, like the heart, into four chambers, dealing with three injured patients in casualty, and the doctor himself, wounded in a different way. We immediately know the personal aspect of the doctor's work, that he is not an automaton stitching up and resuscitating, but a fellow human being who gets disillusioned, saddened, bitter and pained by his work and the people he treats.
Metcalf worked as a rural doctor for many years before recently retiring to write full-time, so he writes from experience as well as imagination.
This collection is divided into three main sections, and covers a broad range of subjects. 'A quiver of lips' is another of the strong pieces, a vignette of doctor stitching up the lip of a young man after a car accident. He speaks to him of his 'favourites' in the casualty room, 'the ones you don't have to treat', the little children who bite their lips through, with the anxious parents hovering around. What the doctor hopes for as he chats away to his wounded patient, is 'a priest to come/ to do the delicate work', as the young man's friend did not fare so well.
Later in the book is 'The airman rolls away', describing the unpleasant, but necessary, task of attending to an old man's incontinence. Metcalf neatly links the rolling away of the patient to cleanse his skin with the rolling of the warplane the now incapacitated man once flew. He talks of adrenalin and its effects on our bowels, the nitty-gritty of an essential function most of us don't want to think about. It is an unsentimental approach to the subject, ending with the doctor's admission he will forget the patient's name, remember 'only his dying skin like a/ paper screen for a movie flickering in a hospital room'.
There are other catchy lines, interesting juxtapositions of words, a playing with words. I kept thinking of the adjective 'clever' all the way through my reading of this collection, and unfortunately, came to the conclusion there was too much throw-away cleverness. There are also too many poems that are inconsequential or banal. Of the thirty-eight poems here, only a dozen got near to tapping my heart, or at least making some impression. Many of the others were disappointing.
'Three ages of grog' for example, repeats the age-old catastrophe of alcoholism without any fresh poetic insight. 'Manic Mary' presents us with the rapid-fire speech and wordplay of a woman in the flush of a manic attack, before the doctor subdues her with medication. This could have been more dynamic and meaningful if more space had been given to Mary. As it is, it's too short, and only a space-filler, which is a shame. 'The most selfish person I ever met', about a woman who demands she been seen before a much more seriously ill patient, is another underworked poem, that introduces a character only to condemn her. I want to know why she behaved the way she did.
'Schizomech' is a cute mechanical metaphor. 'FutureScan' has the funny 'Can you see what sex it is?/ Can you see what colour sheets/ Mum should buy?' and 'The Change' makes the valid point about the pharmaceutical industry and menopause with 'shyly she is sold/ the pretty pack of pills'. But they are forgettable, saying little.
There are serious poems about the suicide of a Koori woman, domestic violence and the effects of stress on doctors, showing that Metcalf has skill and feeling. Having also worked in medicine, I identified too clearly with 'The doctor's complaint', where the female physician heals herself by 'walking right out/ of that in-patient clinic'.
This collection is ultimately frustrating. There is promise here, glimpses of the intelligent poetic use of words to convey profound insight, but it is all too brief. Cleverness has hijacked the poetry, and cut it too ruthlessly.
Citation - Sue Bond. 'Review: Cut to the Word by Tim Metcalf' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2003. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].
Back Cover Blurb - I hated death
as the young doctor should.
I thought I held you up.
I fell so hard.
Where were the tablets I gave you?
The books I read?
Cut to the Word is a moving account of one man's transition from doctor to poet.
Have You Also Read? Corvus
 Tim Metcalf, Charnwood: Ginninderra Press, 2001, 72 Pages, Paperback, $16.50Reviewed by Stephen Lawrence in the October 2002 issue.The raven is traditionally a night bird; however, Tim Metcalf's collection opens with an autumn sunrise lifting this bird into flight across open land. The modern reader is thus more likely to recall Ted Hughes' Crow than the croaking raven bellowing for revenge in Hamlet. At the same time as Corvus emerges from the eye of dawn, the sun's 'harsh light' also rises over the city, and we are quickly enveloped in Metcalf's working day. The opening pieces, and those dealing with his experiences as a doctor, are amongst his best poems. They are grounded in the physical directness of the medically trained, yet his language is often splendidly inventive. A rescue helicopter is an 'ascension in ... read more.
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