Once: Poems
By Alice Walker
4/5
()
About this ebook
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.
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
In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meridian Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Third Life of Grange Copeland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the "People's Historian" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiving by the Word: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Revolutionary Petunias: And Other Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Howard Zinn's Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women's Student Activism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMeridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGeneral's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Once
Related ebooks
Revolutionary Petunias: And Other Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Collection Plate: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Break the Glass Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Living by the Word: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Possessing the Secret of Joy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The World Has Changed: Conversations with Alice Walker Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNext: New Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Temple of My Familiar Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Prose Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bicycles: Love Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965–2000 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGood Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Harlem Shadows: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Three Plays: Lawing and Jawing; Forty Yards; Woofing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMother Body Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Poetry For You
For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You Better Be Lightning Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Weary Blues Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things We Don't Talk About Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEdgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for Once
15 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It'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.
Book preview
Once - Alice Walker
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!
signupOnce
POEMS BY ALICE WALKER
colophoneFor 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