This is Alice Walker's fourth volume of verse and her first since she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple.Using short, nonmetrical lines, these simple lyrics meditate on love and lovers, Afro-Amer-ican experience and heritage, Walker's own family past, women, Indians, hunger, the Third World, and poetry itself.'I understand how poems are made,' she tells us, and perhaps she does, but the poems assembled here seem more posed and self-conscious than those of her powerful first volume Once (1968) in which she successfully combined detached observation, emotional urgency, and understatement. Here many of the poems read more like exercises than necessary utterances.