Bobby Parker’s Working Class Voodoo is an enterprise of dark metaphysics which exists in the same tradition as Thomas de Quincey and Elizabeth Bishop. Punishing, plaintive, improper, vitally comic, Parker employs a vibrato narrative deeply concerned with the cost of both journey and arrival, with the irresistible darkness of both humour and tragedy in contrast and counter to one another. In poems which push at questions of contemporary masculinity, of the domestic and of the bonds of family, our unreliability, our desires, our addictions and our weaknesses are both indulged and confronted. Yet where such commitment to the uncovering of artifice might be expected to provoke disdain, Parker’s singing faith in human love is what these poems reveal. What is lost will be recovered, and what was thought impossible will be achieved, no matter the darkness, no matter the weight. Working Class Voodoo is a confessional and a challenge, and a swampy, seductive ride into the night.