Walker, Alice | James Lasdun (review date 1985)
James Lasdun (review date 1985)
SOURCE: A review of Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, in Books and Bookmen, No. 359, September, 1985, p. 19.
[In the following essay, Lasdun provides a mixed review of Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful.]
‘We are indifferent to England’ writes Alice Walker in ‘Each One, Pull One,’, an impassioned poem/plea for black cultural solidarity. Somewhere in that all-encompassing shrug is a dismissal of the English way of writing poetry, with its emphasis on ironic wit and translation into metaphor—the sort of responses to life that a good poet ought to cultivate. Those seasoned virtues are replaced, in Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, by anger and pathos; anger at racism, sexism, militarism and so forth, pathos in the matter of personal relationships—a visit from the daughter of an estranged husband, a rush of tenderness for a loved one. … Poems,...
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