Hoodoo Voodoo

Poetry. Afro-Caribbean Studies. D.S. Marriott 'dares to dream' in this book...by refolding beautiful romantic lines...into new relation with the real that haunts him, which he attends through mourning and recasts in an art full of loss. These poems do indeed seem to 'contain the whole of death, even before / life has begun', but they engage no refusal, just the overturning of willful stasis and a lyric luring of the undone into poetic doing, to light. HOODOO VOODOO's last section's dark streaming of figures through landscapes...is presided over by 'Ghede', or Guede, after all--best known as the loa of death in Vodou, 'Papa Bones', but also a figure of fertility, of the crossroads between life and afterlife: a trickster, a door, a manipulable sign (as well as a protector of children). Marriott's deployment of such mythological materials and even 'hoodoo' itself in his theatre of 'real ghosts', fears and emergent desires enacts his forging of new relations with the past and his many interlocutors in this book, as well as his Rilkean 'refusal to refuse', a seeming double negative that opens a new way through the many locked doors and crossroads his speakers encounter in these poems. I'm overwhelmed by the beauty that is this book--Romana Huk.