Review of Alice Walker's "A Poem Traveled Down My Arm"

A Poem Traveled Down My Arm
By Alice Walker.
151 pp. Random House, 2003.
$11.

Having a vast selection of poetry to choose from and wanting something moving and inspirational, I was pleased to find Alice Walker smiling at me from between the volumes on the bookstore shelf. A huge fan of her stirring prose, "The Temple of My Familiar" and "The Color Purple," two emotionally evocative novels wrought by beautiful images twisted into deep meaning, I was hopeful and curious about her poetry.

Skimming the small, purple book I was taken with the crude, yet lovable drawings dispersed intermittently among the text, and wanted to know more about how Walker's attempts at folk art renderings would inform her written work. Though I must admit, I was somewhat apprehensive about the crown of flowers atop the angelic head of the serenely smiling Alice Walker of the cover. Somehow she seemed to be attempting to possess and convey to the point of adnauseam the Earth Goddess icon that crops up in our culture as a sort of saving grace. I dismissed my reservations and purchased the book.

Each poem is short, no more than ten lines long, with lines consisting of just enough words to convey the intended meaning. There is, in keeping with the good Earth Goddess motif, a moral to each poem, but this intention is not given away in any title, because no title exists in the pages, save the one given the book itself: "A Poem Traveled Down My Arm". It does indeed seem that each poem traveled down Ms. Walker's arm. The sense that these pieces of moral rectitude and siphoned insight began at her shoulder and marched with purpose to her elbow, wrist, then out each finger is completely plausible with lines like "What is/ a promise/ if/ not/ your/ hand/ in mine?" She makes in these lines a valiant attempt to lead the way to a better, more wholesome world. Yet the strain to reach that world with barely a leg to stand on is acutely felt by the reader.

As for the accompanying drawings that seemed quaintly intriguing during the skim-through, they wind up being merely watered-down art. Some are serene and pleasant, but none expand the nature of the work. If anything, the little doodles make the poems more reminiscent of inspirational greeting cards.

As I read the book a second time, I realized Walker might have been pushing for a rendition of Confucius for modern folks. If that is the case she has often missed her mark with this selection of poems. There are however those few like, "Do not/ cling/ to being/ lost," that leap from the page and startle the reader awake. Unfortunately these gems are few and far between, and though the reader searches harder after having found one, there is only disappointment in the end at not having found more, and a dissatisfaction with having to settle for less engaging tidbits like, "We have seen/ Paradise/ over &/ over/ &/ we have/ lost/ it/ every/ time," pieces that ring true, yet fail to resonate.

Perhaps my expectations of Walker as prose goddess of glowing images linked to fervent meaning and deep emotion subtly advance by a crafted pen, marred my reading of these poems before I even opened to page one. Walker says in the introduction that "[she] saw the poems spoke a different poem-language than [she] usually use[s], which meant [she] was somewhere, within [herself], new." I am happy for Walker that she has found that new place, but as a reader, the leap into this unknown poetry made me want to scurry quickly back to the language of her prose.