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.
About the Author
Tom Yuill is a lecturer in liberal arts at Metropolitan College, Boston University, and associate professor of literature and creative writing at the New England Institute of Art.
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
"'Medicine Show' lives up to both halves of its title: a vivid, exhilarating imagination show that is also strong medicine. Tom Yuill examines the grief and desperation underlying postures and ruses of self-deception. The book's brilliant adaptations and imitations of Hikmet and Villon cast a raking, skeptical light on Texas versions of the quasi-Byronic hero. Yuill's sardonic, clear-eyed comedy is humane and antic: a born talker on a serious mission" – Robert Pinsky
