Once: Poems

By Alice Walker

Alice Walker’s first published book collects poems written as a student and on her first visit to Africa 
 
For readers seeking the origins of Alice Walker’s potent, distinctive voice, this collection will provide ample insight. Composed while she was still a student at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1960s, these poems are already engaged with some of the moral dilemmas that have defined Walker’s entire career. Luminous vignettes from her first trip to Africa give way to reflections on the flourishing civil rights movement, while an eye for the transformative power of love and beauty run through all twenty-seven entries. Walker’s talents are prodigious, yet it’s her pure moral and aesthetic clarity that impress most in this debut work. 

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Nov 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781453224014

Alice Walker

Alice Walker, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is a canonical figure in American letters. She is the author of The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, and many other works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her writings have been translated into more than two dozen languages, and more than fifteen million copies of her books have been sold worldwide. 

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Once

POEMS BY ALICE WALKER

colophone

For Howard Zinn

Poverty was not a calamity for me. It was always balanced by the richness of light … circumstances helped me. To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

—Albert Camus, De l’envers et l’endroit

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note

African Images, Glimpses from a Tiger’s Back

Love

Karamojans

Once

Chic Freedom’s Reflection

South: The Name of Home

Hymn

The Democratic Order: Such Things in Twenty Years I Understood

They Who Feel Death

On being asked to leave a place of honor for one of comfort

The Enemy

Compulsory Chapel

To the Man in the Yellow Terry

The Kiss

What Ovid Taught Me

Mornings

So We’ve Come at Last to Freud

Johann

The Smell of Lebanon

Warning

The Black Prince

Medicine

ballad of the brown girl

Suicide

Excuse

to die before one wakes must be glad

Exercises on Themes from Life

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

Reviews for Once

[ma_washigeri · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's not really possible to put a star rating on most books of poetry - Some resonate, some don't, some are for later, and some I wish I'd read years ago. One I learned by heart so will definitely take that with me, even though - or perhaps because - I've no idea what the last line means.