Medicine Show
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.
Reviews
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
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