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...