Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems
    Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems
    Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems
    Ebook121 pages43 minutes

    Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems

    By Alice Walker

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Poems from the author of The Color Purple: “This book has two fine strengths—a music that comes along sometimes [and] Walker’s own tragicomic gifts” (The New York Times Book Review).
      The title of this collection comes from a Native American shaman who, reflecting on the terrible problems brought by white colonizers, nearly forgave them all because with the settlers came horses to the North American Plains. And, indeed, in these poems we find Alice Walker seeking a saving grace even in the most difficult circumstances, and in the hearts of the most brutal oppressors. Here Walker’s attention turns toward the small moments and subliminal exchanges between lovers and enemies, even as her verse addresses concerns as vast as the choking of the planet by war and pollution.
    This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateNov 22, 2011
    ISBN9781453224045
    Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems
    Author

    Alice Walker

    Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, five children’s books, and several volumes of essays and poetry. She has received the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award, and has been honored with the O. Henry Award, the Lillian Smith Award, and the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction. She was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and received the Lennon Ono Peace Award. Her work has been published in forty languages worldwide.

    Read more from Alice Walker

    Related to Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Poet’s Craft

      Jan 1, 2020

      To begin with a definition: A poem is a text structurally constrained by the repetition of any language element(s). The continuum of poetic constraint is extensive, stretching from operations that a reader will find completely imperceptible to overwh

      9 min read

    • Article

      Why We Write

      Feb 7, 2018

      STEPHANIE STOKES OLIVER has spent her career in magazine and book publishing. Formerly the fashion and beauty merchandising editor at Glamour, founding editor in chief of Heart & Soul, and editor in chief of Essence.com, she most recently served as v

      7 min read

    • Article

      Writing Prompts and Exercises

      Feb 14, 2018

      Suggested Reading: A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry (W. W. Norton, February 2018) by Gregory Orr The author of a dozen books of poetry as well as three books about poetry, including Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Orr de

      2 min read

    • Article

      LOVE, LOSS, & LIBERATION

      Oct 11, 2023

      LOVE, LOSS, & LIBERATION
      12 min read

    • Article

      Akwaeke Emezi

      May 28, 2021

      Akwaeke Emezi
      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Case for Abolition

      Jun 19, 2019

      Our belief in abolition is first and foremost philosophical. It grew from watching, experiencing, and opposing decades of reliance on concrete and steel cages as catch-all solutions to social problems. We want a society that centers freedom and justi

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful

    4/5

    41 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      The poems in this collection are generally short with fairly short lines. Many poems provide insights into the African-American experience or reflect on events of the 1960s and 1970s. I found the poetry enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      She's a wonderful poet. So raw and radical. You should read this.
    • 4/5
      A quick read at barely 80 pages. And a tough one, for me. As a northern small town-raised white man, hard to relate to Alice Walker's inner thoughts so nakedly stated in these poems. But then there was this -"My father and mother both / used to warn me / that 'a whistling woman and a crowing / hen would surely come to no good end' ..." ("Mississippi Winter IV")And I remember my mother reciting that same verse, and, like Walker, she chose to "whistle like a woman undaunted."And there was also her excitement at an upcoming visit, and preparations made, in "My Daughter Is Coming!" A pretty universal experience for older folks.And "" Poem at Thirty-nine" is about a father - " How I miss my father," who taught her to tell the truth, thrift, and cooking"He would have grown / to admire / the woman I've become: / cooking, writing, chopping wood, / staring into the fire."But then there's that steely, strange dedication to her ancestors, including a "white great-great grandfather ... / 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"Chilling, yes. And courageous. And nearly inconceivable to this old white man.This is a book filled with joy and pain, life and living. And certainly worth your time. HORSES MAKE A LANDSCAPE LOOK MORE BEAUTIFUL (a quote from Lame Deer) is a long title for a short book. I rarely read poems, but I liked these. Highly recommended.- Tim Bazzett,author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 5/5
      More wonderful words from Walker, whose prose manages to be more poetic than many a novel.

    Book preview

    Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful - Alice Walker

    bird

    EARLY BIRD BOOKS

    FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

    LOVE TO READ?

    LOVE GREAT SALES?

    GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!

    signup

    Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful

    Poems

    By Alice Walker

    for two who

    slipped away

    almost

    entirely:

    my part Cherokee

    great-grandmother

    Tallulah

    (Grandmama 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.

    Rest in peace.

    The meaning of your lives

    is still

    unfolding.

    Rest in peace.

    In me

    the meaning of your lives

    is still

    unfolding.

    Rest in peace, in me.

    The meaning of your lives

    is still

    unfolding.

    Rest. In me

    the meaning of your lives

    is still

    unfolding.

    Rest. In peace

    in me

    the meaning

    of our lives

    is still

    unfolding.

    Rest.

    Contents

    Publisher’s Note

    Remember?

    These Mornings of Rain

    First, They Said

    Listen

    S M

    The Diamonds on Liz’s Bosom

    We Alone

    Attentiveness

    1971

    Every Morning

    How Poems Are Made / A Discredited View

    Mississippi Winter I

    Mississippi Winter II

    Mississippi Winter III

    Mississippi Winter IV

    love is not concerned

    She said:

    Walker

    Killers

    Songless

    A Few Sirens

    Poem at Thirty-nine

    I Said to Poetry

    Gray

    Overnights

    My Daughter Is Coming!

    When Golda Meir Was in Africa

    If Those People Like You

    On Sight

    I’m Really Very Fond

    Representing the Universe

    Family Of

    Each One, Pull One

    Who?

    Without Commercials

    No One Can Watch the Wasichu

    The Thing Itself

    Torture

    Well.

    Song

    These Days

    A Biography of Alice Walker

    Publisher’s Note

    Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

    But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, "Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1