Fiction. Christopher Columbus, when reporting on his first voyage to the New World, noted "I found very many islands filled with people without number, and of them I have taken possession for their Highnesses, by proclamation and with royal standard displayed, and nobody objected." In responding to Metcalf's earlier book, Apalache, Guy Davenport noted, "Paul Metcalf's sense of new-world history is both a revelation and a vision. Like a medieval chronicler with the eye of a poet and the heart of a tale-teller he fits together radiant fragments into a wholly new kind of construct. He writes with texts the way Ives wrote with scores."