Skip to main content

Medicine Show

In Medicine Show, inner conflict is wonderfully realized in the clash of down-home plain speech and European high culture utterances. Freely translating and adapting Catullus (Latin), Villon (Middle French), Corbiere (French), Hikmet (Turkish), and Orpheus (Greek), and placing them alongside Jagger and Richards, skinheads, and psalms, Tom Yuill’s book mirrors an old-style hawking of wares, with all the charm and absurdity that results when high culture meets pop, when city meets small town, and when provincialism confronts urbanity. Here, the poems talk to one another, one poem nudging the cusps of many others, those poems touching still others’ circumferences. Yuill, by invoking the Rolling Stones as muses and as background music, offers cover versions of Shakespeare, Keats, and Dylan Thomas, ultimately giving us a new kind of verse, funneled through the languages and rhythms of his masters’ voices.


80 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2010

Phoenix Poets

Poetry

Reviews

"Tom Yuill’s Medicine Show almost bursts its seams with its canny exuberance. Raucous, uncouth, elegiac, filial, tender, polished, and rough, these poems pay homage to lost parents, whether the biological mother and father or the poetic ancestors, Catullus, Villon, and Hikmet. Yuill wrings his own tunes from Texas stomp, the Rolling Stones, and the lyric masters of English. He’s reinventing fireworks."

Rosanna Warren

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Coyote


ONE

Bit: An Ode with the Rolling Stones Playing in the Background

Unsolicited Elegy

Lovers

Ode to the Wind

For Orleans

Two Easy Odes

The Blue-Eyed Giant, the Miniature Woman, and the

Honeysuckle

Her Choir

Dallas Skinheads


TWO

Medicine Show

The Blue Balloon

The Toad

Between and

Grief

You Were Not Hanged, and It Was Not Science

Crying


THREE

To Love Thrown Like a Rope

Dilettantes

Dinner Party in the South: A Vision

Damned

Medicine Show

It Happens

Several Histories

Embers of an Ode

Father to Son


FOUR

To the Sound of a String as It Snaps

Medicine Show

Debate with His Heart

Quatrains

Ah! Birthday!

Fragment

Made of Coral

Ballade

Veritas

Notes

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press