‘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, Alice Walker proclaims, are ‘the tears / that season the smile’; they address themselves uninhibitedly to every grand theme, from poverty to love—‘love is concerned / that the beating of your heart / should kill no one.’

In the face of such unashamed emotionality, conventional criticism has little to offer. What is England, the dismissed England of university-nurtured lit. crit. values to make of it? It seems equally patronising to praise observations such as ‘In the world, people die / of hunger’ for their simple directness, as it does to damn them for their banality. One could ignore them, and concentrate instead on the few poems that show Alice Walker working in a more sophisticated vein—‘I Said to Poetry’ with its clever play on George Herbert's antiphonal, dialogue form, or else the vibrant character sketches of her friends that make up ‘These Days’—but to do this would be to misrepresent her; to anglicise her, and that would hardly be appropriate.