Horses make a landscape look more beautiful

This new collection of poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet Alice Walker is characterized by a variety of themes spoken in humor, anger, and love. In spare, eloquent language Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind. She writes of the small joys of life, the blight of racism, injustice and hunger, the need to save the earth from self-destruction, and about poetry itself. "These Days" catalogs the uniqueness of the poet's friends; "Poem at Thirty-Nine" is a tender hymn to her father. In "Family Of," Walker extends and internalizes the meaning of the American Indian term, "Wasichu," signifying greed and violence. In "My Daughter is Coming," she writes about the joys of a daughter's homecoming. "Each One, Pull One" tells of the absolute necessity for the writer to write. ISBN 0-15-142169-2 : $10.95.