For John Metcalf, the short story is an approximation of poetry, offering, through the subtlety and complexity of its linguistic and imagistic patterns, a brief but intense insight into life at its most fundamental psychological and emotional level. Five stories forming a self-contained sequence in John Metcalf's collection The Teeth of My Father – "The Strange Aberration of Mr. Ken Smythe," "The Practice of the Craft," "Gentle as Flowers Make the Stones," "The Years in Exile," and "The Teeth of My Father" – develop the dilemma of the plight of the artist in terms of either the relationship between the artist and society or between the artist's execution of his craft and his own personal life. Through a consideration of language, image, and point of view, these stories allow us to see a progressive internalization and particularization of the artist's predicament.
