Walker, Alice - Sonia Gernes (review date 1985)
Sonia Gernes (review date 1985)
SOURCE: A review of Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful in America, Vol. 152, No. 4, February 2, 1985, pp. 93-4.
[In the following review, Gernes praises Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, but finds some of Walker's political poems to be overwrought.]
“We had no word for the strange animal we got from the white man—the horse. So we called it sunka wakan, ‘holy dog.’ For bringing us the horse we could almost forgive you for bringing us whiskey. Horses make a landscape look more beautiful.” These words from the Indian sage Lame Deer function as both epigraph and theme of Alice Walker's fourth book of poetry. “How,” she asks, “does one cope with the legacy of the white man?” Indeed, how does one cope with all the legacies that make up a life? Walker, a black poet/novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for her third novel. The Color Purple, tells us in the...
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