Some years ago, Randall Jarrell remarked that the best critic who ever lived could not prove that the Iliad is better than "Trees."… [The Black Unicorn] often makes one long for "Trees."… Lorde writes short pieces best viewed under a buzzing fluorescent light. This gray-green diffuseness coldly reveals a world which Sam Pekhinpah might think of filming: a few of the poems are good, many are bad, and most are ugly….

All this ugliness—and there is much more—has a numbing effect, the reader's resignation to a dirty rest room rather than his rage.

Most of the poems are simply bad; they don't work as organic wholes and leave the reader surprised that a piece continues on the next page; their leaden rhythms beat out empty searches for any coherent objective symbols…. Incantational moments in other poems peter out into impotent cliches. Sentences of vigorous promise succumb to the colorless overuse of the verb "to be."

For a resident of Staten Island, Lorde surprisingly drags in a plethora of African mythology (a handy glossary is mercifully provided) which, however, never become integrated into poems like "125th Street" and "A Woman Speaks;" the result is a purple Dashiki patch….

Some good things, however, do emerge from the rubble. When the author sings on a small scale about things that she really knows, in poems like "About Religion," and "Hanging Fire," the fluorescent light turns into a laser beam….

The title poem, "Black Unicorn," laments that the author's persona has been mistaken before and is not free. The reader laments that Lorde has not learned to write less in order to be freely understood.