“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 book's dedication that she is descended not only from the children of ex-slaves in rural Georgia, but from:

my “part” Cherokee
great-grandmother
Tallulah
(Grandma Lula)
on my mother's side
about whom
only one
agreed-upon
thing
is known:
her hair was so long
she could sit on it;
and my white (Anglo-Irish?)
great-great-grandfather
on my father's side:
nameless
(Walker, perhaps?),
whose only remembered act
is that he raped
a child:
my great-great grandmother.
who bore his son,
my great-grandfather,
when she was eleven.

She instructs these ancestors to “Rest in peace, in me,” but owns in the next stanza that “In me / the meaning of your lives / is still unfolding.”

In earlier volumes, Walker introduced us to people who formed her directly remembered heritage—the women of “My mamma's generation / Husky of voice—Stout of / Step / With fists as well as / Hands / How they battered down / Doors … ” or the old men gently swinging a casket through the door, who “shuffled softly” and “stood around waiting / In their / Brown suits” (from Revolutionary Petunias). In this volume, however, she ponders not heritage but the effects of heritage, the conundrums of a world in which justice does not reign for “People of Color,” in which there is a pervasive consciousness of “those people” and “us,” and in which “We do not admire their president / We know why the White House is white.”

Walker comes on strongly about oppression in the more political of these poems:

… they will fill our eyes,
our ears, our noses and our mouths
with the mud
of oblivion. They will chew up
our fingers in the night. They will pick
their teeth with our pens. They will
          sabotage
both our children
and our art.
Because when we show what we see,
they will discern the inevitable:
We do not worship them.

What she protests, however, is any kind of oppression: “Were we black? Were we women? Were we gay?” She is amused but disturbed in the poem “Well,” by a chauvinistic revolutionary who sees the women in his country only as black lips, black legs, or wearing “a red dress, / her breasts / (no kidding!) / like coconuts. …”

The political poems are interspersed with the personal. “Remember me? / I am the girl / with the dark skin / whose shoes are thin … ” in the volume's opening poem is followed by the snug coziness of “These Mornings of Rain,” where “to love and be loved / in absentia / is joy enough for me.” For this reviewer, however, the most effective poems are those in which the personal and political collide. A series of four“Mississippi Winter” poems falls into this category, as do most of the poems following an epigraph by Black Elk about the “Wasichus”—the white men who came and exterminated the bison for mere sport. Walker feels the invasion of the Wasichus into her own consciousness (“Sometimes I feel so bad / I ask myself / Who in the world / have I murdered?”), and in one of the most poignant of the poems, addresses an apparently white husband or lover:

Oh you who seemed
the best of them,
my own sad Wasichus;
in what gibberish
was our freedom
engraved on
our chains.

Taken as a volume, the poems of Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful are powerful poems, reaching back with an aching sense of consequence to those great-great-grandparents who suffered and sinned. But compared to the delightful lyricism and exact detail of Walker's best prose, some of the lesser moments in these poems seem flat, too baldly polemical, lacking in what William Stafford has called “verbal event.” “Torture,” for example, in which we are told “When they torture your mother / plant a tree / When they torture your father / plant a tree … / When they … / … cut down the forest / they have made / start another,” pales beside Carolyn Forche's El Salvador poems; poems such as “Gray,” “Overnights,” or “When Golda Meir Was in Africa” lack the tensile strength of almost any section of Walker's novel, The Color Purple.

The deceptive simplicity of the poems ought not to weigh against them, however. In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind. She begs, in the last, long poem, that the world be saved for individuals who fold their children's tiny shirts, serve bacon, boiled potatoes and coffee, dream of exotic mud facials and “insist on love.” She suggests that:

This could be our revolution:
To love what is plentiful
as much as
what's scarce.