Hoodoo Voodoo

Hoodoo Voodoo is D.S. Marriott's second full-length collection and his first with Shearsman Books. In powerful works that interrogate what it is to be black in a majority white world, and indeed marginalised in any world, that call up unheard voices from the past that still need to speak to us today, Marriott gives us a poetry that we need in Britain today - perhaps more than the US: a poetry that merges the native modernist tradition with an infusion of 'negritude', and does not follow the easy narrative road. This is fine British poetry, pure and simple. That it happens also to be Black British poetry, for those who like easy classifications, is perhaps a bonus, but it is the work itself, not its source, that demands attention, and on its own terms.