SOURCE: A review of Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, in Books and Bookmen, No. 359, September, 1985, p. 19.

In the following essay, Lasdun provides a mixed review of Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful.

‘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...