Customer Reviews

Running the Voodoo Down

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Jim McGarrah's Running the Voodoo Down is the answer for those who ask the question, "What is modern poetry about?" More accurately stated, his poetry is the answer for the malaise in which too much modern poetry finds itself embedded. His poetry is not just fancy footwork written for a clique of fellow insiders who might "get it," as too much of what currently passes for poetry attempts to do. Running the Voodoo Down is timeless poetry that is carved from the soul of someone who has lived too much life, yet not enough. McGarrah's poems at once terrify us, force us to savor each second of life and stand up to our mortality. I read his book at dawn and by midnight that day I was still crying, laughing and shuddering at the emotions his work evoked in me. Weeks later I reread Voodoo and all of the poems hit me flush in the face as if I were reading them for the first time. Buy this book and beware: what you are about to read is the real deal, a collection of poetry that will make you be thankful there is at least one working poet who knows what he is doing.

McGarrah's first book is a fearless yet tender examination of survival in the modern age. A quiet thankfulness, heightened by a relentless questioning, courses through these poems and tempers any cause for bravado while the forces of luck and chance clash with the mysteries of love and faith. By exposing how impersonal politics have very real consequences on the individual, McGarrah has created a collection which not only illuminates times past, but is crucial to times present. This direct, accesible and honest work announces, finally, the arrival of a true American poet.

McGarrah's strong command of language combined with the raw energy of a life lived at the edge creates poems of brilliant intensity. He has the ability to merge beauty and brutality with stunning success. The emotions I felt from McGarrah's work stayed with me long after I closed the book. His work provides us with a modern-day hero whose truths resonate.

It is no wonder McGarrah opens this collection with the following lines from Komunyakaa's Thanks: Again, thanks for the dud / hand grenade tossed at my feet / outside Chu Lai. I'm still / falling through the silence. It is through this gratitude that we enter the poet's world. Running the Voodoo Down is a volume that recognizes the gift of its own existence. Chokingly beautiful, each poem breathes with the keen electricity and sensuality of a man determined to record every detail of a world he nearly lost.