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Revolutionary Petunias: A Collection of Witty and Pungent Poems on Love, Loss, and Hope
These poems are about revolutionaries and lovers-about how, both in revolution and in love, loss of trust and compassion robs us of hope. They are also about (and for) those few embattled souls who remain painfully committed to beauty and to love even while facing the firing squad. “Quick, direct, witty, pungent” (DeWitt Beall, Chicago Daily News).
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
38 people are currently reading
978 people want to read
About the author
Alice Walker
247 books7,361 followersNoted American writer Alice Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her stance against racism and sexism in such novels as
The Color Purple
(1982).
People awarded this preeminent author of stories, essays, and poetry of the United States. In 1983, this first African woman for fiction also received the national book award. Her other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland , Meridian , The Temple of My Familiar , and Possessing the Secret of Joy . In public life, Walker worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.
People awarded this preeminent author of stories, essays, and poetry of the United States. In 1983, this first African woman for fiction also received the national book award. Her other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland , Meridian , The Temple of My Familiar , and Possessing the Secret of Joy . In public life, Walker worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
December 26, 2013
Walker at her best. Pensive. Strong. Unapologetic. Spin the wheel of African American History and her words fit, timeless.
This edition has additional biographical information on Walker. I really like the Open Road ebook editions with the extras.
And thank the publisher for providing copy for review. Note I have a hard copy on my shelf but this is a great book to have in both formats, as it demands dipping into throughout a lifetime.
This edition has additional biographical information on Walker. I really like the Open Road ebook editions with the extras.
And thank the publisher for providing copy for review. Note I have a hard copy on my shelf but this is a great book to have in both formats, as it demands dipping into throughout a lifetime.
August 20, 2017
Beautiful poetry collection.
February 10, 2017
Alice Walker's poems are magically simple. Some witty, some sad, while others just reflective of Walker's youth but all reminiscent of times lost but remembered!
"And for ourselves, the intrinsic
“Purpose” is to reach, and to remember,
and to declare our commitment to all
the living, without deceit, and without
fear, and without reservation. We do
what we can. And by doing it, we keep
ourselves trusting, which is to say,
vulnerable, and more than that,
what can anyone ask?"
"And for ourselves, the intrinsic
“Purpose” is to reach, and to remember,
and to declare our commitment to all
the living, without deceit, and without
fear, and without reservation. We do
what we can. And by doing it, we keep
ourselves trusting, which is to say,
vulnerable, and more than that,
what can anyone ask?"
May 2, 2017
I think I like her poetry better. There is a beauty and harshness to it that is quite nice.
August 10, 2020
Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems
Alice Walker
This was the second collection of Alice Walker’s poems that I have read in the past few weeks. A few weeks ago I reviewed her collection “Once”. Both of these books spent many years on my late mother’s bookshelf. Now they are part of my library. This particular edition was printed in 1973 - which makes it almost 50 years old. We don’t often wonder about the life of a book but I hope this one can be read by my children someday.
Like “Once”, which was dedicated to the great Howard Zinn, the dedication in this collection caught my attention as well. She dedicates it to George Jackson, members of SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), Bob Moses, Winson Hudson and Fannie Lou Hamer (among a few others) - all of whom were revolutionaries in their own right. To become familiar with these names I suggest one read Walker’s collection of essays entitled “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” because there she introduces us to many of them.
Several poems in this collection caught my attention. I “dog-eared” those pages as I do in most poetry collections I treat myself to. In an eight-part poem entitled “In These Dissenting Times” the part entitled “Women” describes the way her mother’s generation fought for their children’s education. She alludes to a military campaign with the purpose, “To discover books/Desks/A place for us/How they knew what we/Must know/ without knowing a page/Of it/Themselves.” I think of students and the privileges many of them have, which they take for granted. It is a stark reminder not only that just a generation ago education was not a foregone conclusion but that the education present and future is only one step away from a critical regression to a time when every public institution is under threat. The most important aspect of this poem however is the way it highlights a fundamental principle of a functioning society - community action for the betterment of the children of that community. While it should have been provided as a public good, because of school segregation the women of that community had to ensure that their children had the best they could provide. This was resistance to the racist structures of segregation at the time - in a way revolutionary.
The poem from which the text takes its title, “Revolutionary Petunias” is about a woman who avenges her husband’s murder. It is filled with irony and interesting images. In her last words to her children she reminds them “Don’t y’all forget to WATER/my purple petunias.” (In the original emphasis was in italics but the “goodreads” format doesn’t allow for italics so I capitalized). As I re-read this poem I am flung back to an essay in Prof. Walker’s collection “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” because flower gardens held a special, and revolutionary, place in her mother’s expression of creativity. Her mother had a particular affinity for petunias. So in this poem we see a touch of that connection the author had with her mother, and by extension women who expressed themselves through their gardening.
Some of the other poems I liked in particular included, “Be Nobody’s Darling,” “Judge Every One with Perfect Calm,” “The QPP, “Forbidden Things,” and “No Fixed Things.” I have not checked but one could probably find these poems on the Internet. I recommend you take the time to look them up and enjoy them. I once investigated, on behalf of a student of mine, how one might go about getting their poems published and whether self publishing on Amazon was viable. I was told, “There is no money in poetry.” I wonder if there ever was. Maybe there is money in it for big-named authors. Maybe access to poetry online has exacerbated the problem of earning an income as a poet. But access to poetry online has changed how people interact with poetry - when they do interact with it. Maybe poetry should not be a commodity. Poets should, however, not starve for the sake of sharing their insights to the world. That might be something the National Endowment for the Arts could facilitate, if it were funded appropriately. Is poetry important? I guess it depends on your life perspective. As Prof. Walker points out, “WE are hungry for a life that turns us on; we yearn for a knowledge of living that will save us from our innocuous lives that resemble death.” (Ibid p.. 122) To me this means poetry is important in order to save ourselves - everyone. Frankly I cannot think of a worse hell than an innocuous life that resembles death. Furthermore, why shouldn’t we all be able to open our minds to the possibility that we can have a life more in touch with our own humanity and the humanity of others.
I think of poetry as a form of meditation, communication that requires a willingness to calm one’s mind and get in touch with truths and smaller truths. It allows one to find, what Alice Walker once referred to as an, “appreciation of art, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world, the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of the growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world.” (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, p. 5). When I read “Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems” I had that feeling of gaining an appreciation of things that I did not have before. I think I also benefited from reading these poems contemporaneously with her essays on writing. In one of her essays she talks about poetry, “Unless poetry has mystery, many meanings, and some ambiguities (necessary for mystery) I am not interested in it.” (Ibid p. 257) I hope you get a chance to read Alice Walker’s poems and find that mystery with words that pull a thread of mystery within yourself.
Alice Walker
This was the second collection of Alice Walker’s poems that I have read in the past few weeks. A few weeks ago I reviewed her collection “Once”. Both of these books spent many years on my late mother’s bookshelf. Now they are part of my library. This particular edition was printed in 1973 - which makes it almost 50 years old. We don’t often wonder about the life of a book but I hope this one can be read by my children someday.
Like “Once”, which was dedicated to the great Howard Zinn, the dedication in this collection caught my attention as well. She dedicates it to George Jackson, members of SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), Bob Moses, Winson Hudson and Fannie Lou Hamer (among a few others) - all of whom were revolutionaries in their own right. To become familiar with these names I suggest one read Walker’s collection of essays entitled “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” because there she introduces us to many of them.
Several poems in this collection caught my attention. I “dog-eared” those pages as I do in most poetry collections I treat myself to. In an eight-part poem entitled “In These Dissenting Times” the part entitled “Women” describes the way her mother’s generation fought for their children’s education. She alludes to a military campaign with the purpose, “To discover books/Desks/A place for us/How they knew what we/Must know/ without knowing a page/Of it/Themselves.” I think of students and the privileges many of them have, which they take for granted. It is a stark reminder not only that just a generation ago education was not a foregone conclusion but that the education present and future is only one step away from a critical regression to a time when every public institution is under threat. The most important aspect of this poem however is the way it highlights a fundamental principle of a functioning society - community action for the betterment of the children of that community. While it should have been provided as a public good, because of school segregation the women of that community had to ensure that their children had the best they could provide. This was resistance to the racist structures of segregation at the time - in a way revolutionary.
The poem from which the text takes its title, “Revolutionary Petunias” is about a woman who avenges her husband’s murder. It is filled with irony and interesting images. In her last words to her children she reminds them “Don’t y’all forget to WATER/my purple petunias.” (In the original emphasis was in italics but the “goodreads” format doesn’t allow for italics so I capitalized). As I re-read this poem I am flung back to an essay in Prof. Walker’s collection “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” because flower gardens held a special, and revolutionary, place in her mother’s expression of creativity. Her mother had a particular affinity for petunias. So in this poem we see a touch of that connection the author had with her mother, and by extension women who expressed themselves through their gardening.
Some of the other poems I liked in particular included, “Be Nobody’s Darling,” “Judge Every One with Perfect Calm,” “The QPP, “Forbidden Things,” and “No Fixed Things.” I have not checked but one could probably find these poems on the Internet. I recommend you take the time to look them up and enjoy them. I once investigated, on behalf of a student of mine, how one might go about getting their poems published and whether self publishing on Amazon was viable. I was told, “There is no money in poetry.” I wonder if there ever was. Maybe there is money in it for big-named authors. Maybe access to poetry online has exacerbated the problem of earning an income as a poet. But access to poetry online has changed how people interact with poetry - when they do interact with it. Maybe poetry should not be a commodity. Poets should, however, not starve for the sake of sharing their insights to the world. That might be something the National Endowment for the Arts could facilitate, if it were funded appropriately. Is poetry important? I guess it depends on your life perspective. As Prof. Walker points out, “WE are hungry for a life that turns us on; we yearn for a knowledge of living that will save us from our innocuous lives that resemble death.” (Ibid p.. 122) To me this means poetry is important in order to save ourselves - everyone. Frankly I cannot think of a worse hell than an innocuous life that resembles death. Furthermore, why shouldn’t we all be able to open our minds to the possibility that we can have a life more in touch with our own humanity and the humanity of others.
I think of poetry as a form of meditation, communication that requires a willingness to calm one’s mind and get in touch with truths and smaller truths. It allows one to find, what Alice Walker once referred to as an, “appreciation of art, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one’s glance at the varied world, the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of the growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world.” (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, p. 5). When I read “Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems” I had that feeling of gaining an appreciation of things that I did not have before. I think I also benefited from reading these poems contemporaneously with her essays on writing. In one of her essays she talks about poetry, “Unless poetry has mystery, many meanings, and some ambiguities (necessary for mystery) I am not interested in it.” (Ibid p. 257) I hope you get a chance to read Alice Walker’s poems and find that mystery with words that pull a thread of mystery within yourself.
June 26, 2015
I read this in Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete.
This was not as good as Once, but it was a worthwhile read. Walker uses her time in the South and her activity in the Voter Registration campaign as a backdrop for this collection. She also draws on the early stages of her relationship with Melvyn Leventhal, whom she met at about the same time, and these two aspects combine into a focus on love and revolution and how they interact. The poems were heartfelt and honest, but seemed to be (for the most part) missing a musicality that she achieved in much of Once. The poems were, again, typically short free-verse compositions, but many of these were lacking in attention to sound and shape, feeling more like incredibly brief essays than anything else. There were a few experiments with rhyme and meter, like "Eagle Rock", but most of these seemed forced.
In terms of content, these poems were extremely powerful, and the imagery of funerals, death, and flowers gives the book an element of unity and reminds us how change can be slow and dangerous, but the best of it needs some beauty and love to take hold. Walker captures place very effectively in poems like the numbered pieces in the section "In These Dissenting Times" and in "Burial" and the attitudes of love and revolution in "Revolutionary Petunias", "For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties" (one of my favorites), and "Forbidden Things", but on the whole the poems of Revolutionary Petunias did not sing the way they could have done.
This was not as good as Once, but it was a worthwhile read. Walker uses her time in the South and her activity in the Voter Registration campaign as a backdrop for this collection. She also draws on the early stages of her relationship with Melvyn Leventhal, whom she met at about the same time, and these two aspects combine into a focus on love and revolution and how they interact. The poems were heartfelt and honest, but seemed to be (for the most part) missing a musicality that she achieved in much of Once. The poems were, again, typically short free-verse compositions, but many of these were lacking in attention to sound and shape, feeling more like incredibly brief essays than anything else. There were a few experiments with rhyme and meter, like "Eagle Rock", but most of these seemed forced.
In terms of content, these poems were extremely powerful, and the imagery of funerals, death, and flowers gives the book an element of unity and reminds us how change can be slow and dangerous, but the best of it needs some beauty and love to take hold. Walker captures place very effectively in poems like the numbered pieces in the section "In These Dissenting Times" and in "Burial" and the attitudes of love and revolution in "Revolutionary Petunias", "For My Sister Molly Who in the Fifties" (one of my favorites), and "Forbidden Things", but on the whole the poems of Revolutionary Petunias did not sing the way they could have done.
February 12, 2015
4 STARS
Reissued
(I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review).
This collection of poetry was first published in 1978 and these poems were written while Alice Walker was immersed in civil rights movement. In these poems you can feel the time and place of the speaker. There is passion behind the poetry that invokes feelings within you whether you know of the civil rights movement or just hear about it. There is love, hope, vision, anger, violence and a feeling of togetherness and being separate. I recommend this collection to everyone.
Reissued
(I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review).
This collection of poetry was first published in 1978 and these poems were written while Alice Walker was immersed in civil rights movement. In these poems you can feel the time and place of the speaker. There is passion behind the poetry that invokes feelings within you whether you know of the civil rights movement or just hear about it. There is love, hope, vision, anger, violence and a feeling of togetherness and being separate. I recommend this collection to everyone.
October 21, 2008
Oh, how I adore Alice Walker:
The Girl Who Died #1
"Look!" she cried.
"I am not perfect
but still your sister.
Love me!"
But the mob beat her and kicked her
and shaved her head;
until she saw exactly
how wrong she was.
The Girl Who Died #1
"Look!" she cried.
"I am not perfect
but still your sister.
Love me!"
But the mob beat her and kicked her
and shaved her head;
until she saw exactly
how wrong she was.
December 31, 2012
I love Alice Walker the poet, activist, essayist, novelist. These poems from the early 70s are fierce and beautiful and wise.
April 4, 2014
Good early poems by a great poet.
January 18, 2015
I love Alice Walker and this book did not disapoint!! Beautiful x
April 21, 2019
Short and easy read. These poems were beautiful and a necessary reminder in these times. So many gems. Alice Walker is a GOAT.
October 6, 2023
so good i can’t even pick out my favorites
August 17, 2024
This book finds me at just the right time.
April 3, 2021
hmmm i’m too dumb for poetry but i think i enjoyed this? although admittedly several poems went over my head but i’ll reread this na lang
June 11, 2021
This review refers to the 1973 Harvest / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition of the text.
I do admire Alice Walker as a thinker and have heard (of course) many accolades for her writing, but I had never read any of her books before; this is my first. The stated premise for Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems—that it critiques the loss of love and hope amidst the realism of revolution, and celebrates those who preserve their belief in love and beauty even amidst horror and war—greatly appeals to me, as someone with both sympathy for the radical and a deep well of sentimental reservation about a politics of violence and power. Unfortunately, this book didn’t quite meet my expectations based off of that premise. But it was still an enjoyable, often moving, and occasionally illuminating read.
Walker’s poetic style is clear, confident, and emotionally rich. In her hands, straightforward sentences (punctuated with the occasional delicious grammatical tangle) bear enormous emotional weight, and she accomplishes impressive nuance with unpretentious word choice. Short, terse lines give her poems a precise, exacting demeanor on the page. The occasional rhymes of this book are also, I think, a masterclass in doing rhymed modern poetry well—they are subtle and irregular, such that rather than feeling like a structure imposed upon the poem they feel like a cohering effect emerging from within the poem itself; such that rather than feeling like the language has been selected in such a way as to produce a rhyme it feels like the language has settled gently into the rhyme of its own accord.
The book’s first section is a largely autobiographical reflection on grief, family, and community. I think this is my favorite part of the book: she writes with an incisive but loving eye about her family and community, and she describes grief with insight and sensitivity. Black life, death, and religion are all treated here as both weighty and ordinary, capable of being described casually (as she does) but deserving to be given weight and significance (which she also does). Her writing about death throughout is just terrific; early on she closely relates death and memory which is a thought-provoking and astute choice, describing her late grandmother as being, dead, “forgetful of it all,” describing her own hurt as being more for memories and not as much for the fact of death. Later on she imagines her own death an “immaculate / corridor/passion”—that slash, treating two such different nouns as abstract “passion” and concrete “corridor” as interchangeable, the weighty religious vibes from “passion” and “immaculate,” and the unexpectedness of the word “corridor,” make this one of my favorite phrases in the whole book.
There is indeed revolutionary sentiment here (see “Eagle Rock”) and in the title track “Revolutionary Petunias” she suggests that not all violence is evil: she has a female character, Sammy Rue, laugh about being painted as angry and militant for avenging her husband. But it’s a complicated moment: this character is so mad about the misrepresentation that she laughs, “fit to kill.” The poem sides with Sammy Rue, justifies her violence, mourns her execution, celebrates her dignity and humanity in the face of it all, but it also emphasizes the circularity and inescapability of anger and violence. Walker takes a much darker view of revolutionary thought in “He Said Come,” which describes someone who should be a comrade in solidarity acting instead as an exploiter. There, as in the excellent “Clutter-up People” (my third favorite poem in the book, if I had to rank them) which derides war as “too comprehensible,” Walker’s critique is against a certain laziness of imagination among the supposedly revolutionary, against those who reiterate rather than dissolve violences.
Her approach deepens on the complex, difficult “No Fixed Place,” which wants to believe that “shy love” will win out and find its place, while at the same time saying there is, well, “no fixed place” for people, that believing in miracles will not save us, that “shy love” will only win when aided by “voluptuous blood”—“blood:” bloodshed, or as metonymy for life and love? I cannot make my mind up as to whether this poem is bleak or hopeful or what (at first it seemed soaked in despair, but as I’ve sat with it I’ve become more unsure). It’s certainly the deepest, gnarliest, and most well-rounded treatment of those themes in the book. My second favorite of these poems is probably “Black Mail,” which is also quite dark. It conjures up the resonant and arresting image of the crucifixion of a man in a suit of armor, who can only be stabbed through the gaps of his helmet. I am still not sure what to make of it, what that image might represent or correspond to, but it’s very striking and haunting and has stuck with me.
My favorite in the book, and the poem which probably ties this book’s themes together the best, is the penultimate poem “Beyond What.” In contrast to the martial, “too comprehensible” comfort zone of those loveless revolutionaries the book critiques, Walker here imagines lovers as seeking “destinies beyond / what we have come to know.” She imagines the union of lovers as not “melting” but “known mystery. / Shared but inviolate.” This is both a much more appealing and beautiful understanding of love and intimacy than any claim to complete unity could be, as well as a subtly political formulation with implications for the way individuals and movements interact. And in the poem’s last stanza she articulates both a methodology for political work, and an imagination of a political endpoint: a “council between equals,” for which the word may as well be love. It’s a beautiful and thoughtful statement that really elegantly ties love and politics together; I wish the whole book had been like this one poem.
But instead there was also a fair bit of this book that let me down; I loved some of these poems, yes, but many left little to no impression on me at all, and others even left a poor impression. Some of the poems veer into the imperative mood, straightforwardly providing moral dictates to the audience; these also did not appeal to me, as I did not feel that they had particularly strong insights, were particularly well expressed, or were a particularly effective or forceful method for transmitting those instructions. Other poems end up more corny than touching, more cringey than profound: for example, the final poem in the book, with its pompous capitalization and the choice to end the book on the italicized sentence fragment line “Revolutionary Petunia.” (an obvious ending that felt limp, not impactful, and contributed absolutely nothing in terms of either beauty or meaning), meant that I closed this book with a somewhat soured impression of it, especially since this underwhelming conclusion came right after “Beyond What” which I so loved.
And I guess (and maybe this was just due to a deficiency in my reading, that I may have missed some subtle connections?) I was somewhat disappointed in how rarely the poems actually directly engaged with the stated theme of the book. I’ve written above about how much I appreciate how some of the poems think about that topic, but honestly those poems are rather few and far between. The autobiographical grounding of the beginning, with its reflections on what death means, what community means, etc., would be the perfect springboard for a serious reckoning with the high stakes of revolution, but Walker never really makes that move. Where the poems are about revolution, they are most often about its lovelessness, not about what it would be like to preserve love in them; where the poems are about love, it is more often about interpersonal love—it is possible to read revolutionary possibility into these love poems, but Walker doesn’t usually make any textual moves in that direction. (I also wonder somewhat about the political utility of focusing so much on the lovelessness of revolution, while only once or twice remarking on the lovelessness of that which revolution opposes.) A lot of the lovier poems about intimacy are …fine? But not particularly interesting to me, and not what I had hoped this book’s love poems would do. (Side note: many of these later poems place a lot of weight on giving/taking/gifting/possessing. I’m not totally sure how that fits in with these larger themes, but it is interesting.) Maybe it’s that, by opening the book with an artist statement that lays out her intended theme, Walker grants herself dispensation from reiterating that theme in the poetry itself; that that indication of theme is meant to give us a framework to read it through, not lay out a roadmap for the poet herself to follow. But even in that case, the book still only really makes glancing engagements with the problems and possibilities of Walker’s stated heme, and it dallies more often elsewhere. I don’t think poetry books need theses, I don’t think all poems in a book have to reflect a thesis statement if there is one; but this book does have a thesis, and I feel like the poems therein don’t quite live up to it.
These are not fatal flaws, and this is not at all a bad book. I was impressed with the clarity and force of Walker’s poetic voice, and even if this book didn’t quite do the political work I hoped it would, I am still convinced that her perspective can be valuable and instructive. If I understand the timeline correctly, this is an early work in a storied career; even if this book didn’t entirely do it for me, its promise makes me think I should seek more Alice Walker out.
I do admire Alice Walker as a thinker and have heard (of course) many accolades for her writing, but I had never read any of her books before; this is my first. The stated premise for Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems—that it critiques the loss of love and hope amidst the realism of revolution, and celebrates those who preserve their belief in love and beauty even amidst horror and war—greatly appeals to me, as someone with both sympathy for the radical and a deep well of sentimental reservation about a politics of violence and power. Unfortunately, this book didn’t quite meet my expectations based off of that premise. But it was still an enjoyable, often moving, and occasionally illuminating read.
Walker’s poetic style is clear, confident, and emotionally rich. In her hands, straightforward sentences (punctuated with the occasional delicious grammatical tangle) bear enormous emotional weight, and she accomplishes impressive nuance with unpretentious word choice. Short, terse lines give her poems a precise, exacting demeanor on the page. The occasional rhymes of this book are also, I think, a masterclass in doing rhymed modern poetry well—they are subtle and irregular, such that rather than feeling like a structure imposed upon the poem they feel like a cohering effect emerging from within the poem itself; such that rather than feeling like the language has been selected in such a way as to produce a rhyme it feels like the language has settled gently into the rhyme of its own accord.
The book’s first section is a largely autobiographical reflection on grief, family, and community. I think this is my favorite part of the book: she writes with an incisive but loving eye about her family and community, and she describes grief with insight and sensitivity. Black life, death, and religion are all treated here as both weighty and ordinary, capable of being described casually (as she does) but deserving to be given weight and significance (which she also does). Her writing about death throughout is just terrific; early on she closely relates death and memory which is a thought-provoking and astute choice, describing her late grandmother as being, dead, “forgetful of it all,” describing her own hurt as being more for memories and not as much for the fact of death. Later on she imagines her own death an “immaculate / corridor/passion”—that slash, treating two such different nouns as abstract “passion” and concrete “corridor” as interchangeable, the weighty religious vibes from “passion” and “immaculate,” and the unexpectedness of the word “corridor,” make this one of my favorite phrases in the whole book.
There is indeed revolutionary sentiment here (see “Eagle Rock”) and in the title track “Revolutionary Petunias” she suggests that not all violence is evil: she has a female character, Sammy Rue, laugh about being painted as angry and militant for avenging her husband. But it’s a complicated moment: this character is so mad about the misrepresentation that she laughs, “fit to kill.” The poem sides with Sammy Rue, justifies her violence, mourns her execution, celebrates her dignity and humanity in the face of it all, but it also emphasizes the circularity and inescapability of anger and violence. Walker takes a much darker view of revolutionary thought in “He Said Come,” which describes someone who should be a comrade in solidarity acting instead as an exploiter. There, as in the excellent “Clutter-up People” (my third favorite poem in the book, if I had to rank them) which derides war as “too comprehensible,” Walker’s critique is against a certain laziness of imagination among the supposedly revolutionary, against those who reiterate rather than dissolve violences.
Her approach deepens on the complex, difficult “No Fixed Place,” which wants to believe that “shy love” will win out and find its place, while at the same time saying there is, well, “no fixed place” for people, that believing in miracles will not save us, that “shy love” will only win when aided by “voluptuous blood”—“blood:” bloodshed, or as metonymy for life and love? I cannot make my mind up as to whether this poem is bleak or hopeful or what (at first it seemed soaked in despair, but as I’ve sat with it I’ve become more unsure). It’s certainly the deepest, gnarliest, and most well-rounded treatment of those themes in the book. My second favorite of these poems is probably “Black Mail,” which is also quite dark. It conjures up the resonant and arresting image of the crucifixion of a man in a suit of armor, who can only be stabbed through the gaps of his helmet. I am still not sure what to make of it, what that image might represent or correspond to, but it’s very striking and haunting and has stuck with me.
My favorite in the book, and the poem which probably ties this book’s themes together the best, is the penultimate poem “Beyond What.” In contrast to the martial, “too comprehensible” comfort zone of those loveless revolutionaries the book critiques, Walker here imagines lovers as seeking “destinies beyond / what we have come to know.” She imagines the union of lovers as not “melting” but “known mystery. / Shared but inviolate.” This is both a much more appealing and beautiful understanding of love and intimacy than any claim to complete unity could be, as well as a subtly political formulation with implications for the way individuals and movements interact. And in the poem’s last stanza she articulates both a methodology for political work, and an imagination of a political endpoint: a “council between equals,” for which the word may as well be love. It’s a beautiful and thoughtful statement that really elegantly ties love and politics together; I wish the whole book had been like this one poem.
But instead there was also a fair bit of this book that let me down; I loved some of these poems, yes, but many left little to no impression on me at all, and others even left a poor impression. Some of the poems veer into the imperative mood, straightforwardly providing moral dictates to the audience; these also did not appeal to me, as I did not feel that they had particularly strong insights, were particularly well expressed, or were a particularly effective or forceful method for transmitting those instructions. Other poems end up more corny than touching, more cringey than profound: for example, the final poem in the book, with its pompous capitalization and the choice to end the book on the italicized sentence fragment line “Revolutionary Petunia.” (an obvious ending that felt limp, not impactful, and contributed absolutely nothing in terms of either beauty or meaning), meant that I closed this book with a somewhat soured impression of it, especially since this underwhelming conclusion came right after “Beyond What” which I so loved.
And I guess (and maybe this was just due to a deficiency in my reading, that I may have missed some subtle connections?) I was somewhat disappointed in how rarely the poems actually directly engaged with the stated theme of the book. I’ve written above about how much I appreciate how some of the poems think about that topic, but honestly those poems are rather few and far between. The autobiographical grounding of the beginning, with its reflections on what death means, what community means, etc., would be the perfect springboard for a serious reckoning with the high stakes of revolution, but Walker never really makes that move. Where the poems are about revolution, they are most often about its lovelessness, not about what it would be like to preserve love in them; where the poems are about love, it is more often about interpersonal love—it is possible to read revolutionary possibility into these love poems, but Walker doesn’t usually make any textual moves in that direction. (I also wonder somewhat about the political utility of focusing so much on the lovelessness of revolution, while only once or twice remarking on the lovelessness of that which revolution opposes.) A lot of the lovier poems about intimacy are …fine? But not particularly interesting to me, and not what I had hoped this book’s love poems would do. (Side note: many of these later poems place a lot of weight on giving/taking/gifting/possessing. I’m not totally sure how that fits in with these larger themes, but it is interesting.) Maybe it’s that, by opening the book with an artist statement that lays out her intended theme, Walker grants herself dispensation from reiterating that theme in the poetry itself; that that indication of theme is meant to give us a framework to read it through, not lay out a roadmap for the poet herself to follow. But even in that case, the book still only really makes glancing engagements with the problems and possibilities of Walker’s stated heme, and it dallies more often elsewhere. I don’t think poetry books need theses, I don’t think all poems in a book have to reflect a thesis statement if there is one; but this book does have a thesis, and I feel like the poems therein don’t quite live up to it.
These are not fatal flaws, and this is not at all a bad book. I was impressed with the clarity and force of Walker’s poetic voice, and even if this book didn’t quite do the political work I hoped it would, I am still convinced that her perspective can be valuable and instructive. If I understand the timeline correctly, this is an early work in a storied career; even if this book didn’t entirely do it for me, its promise makes me think I should seek more Alice Walker out.
December 4, 2018
Lovely poems. Elegantly simple and straightforward. Timeless in the sense that they address suffering and the need, sometimes, for petunias (for beauty), and those are themes that will continue to resonate.
May 11, 2007
Great poetry. Walker is amazing. This collection includes "Expect Nothing," my favorite poem ever.
August 29, 2009
A sweet, funny and memorable collection of poems about a Black female speaker's experiences with love and revolution.
August 9, 2016
There are some poems for the ages in here. Some I have already forgotten, but several will stay with me for a long time.
December 13, 2020
Alice Walker's Revolutionary Petunias is a tribute to those who attempted and sometimes succeeded in breaking the bondage of life situations through memory recorded and cherished. Entries include "Expect Nothing" an ode to living frugally; " The Older Warrior Terror" depicting the life of one who died in their bed and never smiled; "Uncles" which represents the Northern travelers who come back to their Southern roots for quick visits, hair layered with pomade and good for a nickel or maybe a dime; and other mini portraits from those who break boundaries even within limited circumstances. Resonate, and both lush and sparse, this collection of poems is for Alice Walker aficionados, and those who enjoy poetry that tells a story.
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July 14, 2023I will always love everything Alice Walker writes. My favorite poem in this volume was written for Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney and Walker’s husband at the time. The book was published in 1973, only six years after SCOTUS decided Loving in favor of love. Reverberations continue.
While Love is Unfashionable
While love is unfashionable
Let us live
Unfashionably.
Seeing the world
A complex ball
In small hands;
Love our blackest garment.
Let us be poor
In all but truth, and courage
Handed down
By the old
Spirits.
Let us be intimate with
Ancestral ghosts
And music
Of the undead.
While love is dangerous
Let us walk bareheaded
Beside the Great River
Let us gather blossoms
Under fire.
While Love is Unfashionable
While love is unfashionable
Let us live
Unfashionably.
Seeing the world
A complex ball
In small hands;
Love our blackest garment.
Let us be poor
In all but truth, and courage
Handed down
By the old
Spirits.
Let us be intimate with
Ancestral ghosts
And music
Of the undead.
While love is dangerous
Let us walk bareheaded
Beside the Great River
Let us gather blossoms
Under fire.
June 19, 2020
wow. ok i was planning on reading half of this since my eyes were ready to shut but after i read the first poem i just couldn’t stop reading the other ones.
i have a hate/love relationship with poem books because most of the time they don’t really catch my attention and other times they do.
this book though.. oh my god?? now i know poems and stories are way different but reading this made me excited to read "the color purple" which is another work by alice walker.
also fun fact: i found out she lives (or used to, maybe she moved by now) in northern cali which is so fucking cool since no one literally wants to live here.
anyways, i highly recommend especially if you’re into poems!!
i have a hate/love relationship with poem books because most of the time they don’t really catch my attention and other times they do.
this book though.. oh my god?? now i know poems and stories are way different but reading this made me excited to read "the color purple" which is another work by alice walker.
also fun fact: i found out she lives (or used to, maybe she moved by now) in northern cali which is so fucking cool since no one literally wants to live here.
anyways, i highly recommend especially if you’re into poems!!
June 1, 2022
I really enjoyed reading Revolutionary Petunias and was able to finish it within a day. Flipping between the pages felt like a breeze as each poem felt lovingly interconnected, and delicately woven with the one subsequent. One of my favorite stanzas lies on page 23 in the poem titled "Baptism," "With God's mud ruining my snowy socks and his bullfrog spoors gluing up on my face." As a writer, I aspire to be more descriptive using metaphors and symbolism--I've really admired the ways that Alice Walker has incorporated it throughout her poems. I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys political poetry or anyone who is looking for poems beyond Rupi Kaur's portfolio.
February 3, 2018
It’s been decades since I’ve read Alice Walker and I enjoyed this dip back into her world. There were some great moments in this one, subtle references to freedom fighters like Fannie Lou Hamer and literary giants like Zora Neale Hurston, and much exploration of Black funerals. So vivid were some of the pieces, like this stanza from a poem for a bully:
Here are the warm and juicy
vocal cords,
slithery,
from my throat.
Also, loved her bio at the end where I learned that she worked for NAACP LDF taking depositions about Black voter disenfranchisement! Made me feel all the more close to her.
Here are the warm and juicy
vocal cords,
slithery,
from my throat.
Also, loved her bio at the end where I learned that she worked for NAACP LDF taking depositions about Black voter disenfranchisement! Made me feel all the more close to her.
August 19, 2019
There's something so pleasurably unaffected about Alice Walker's poetry, in how she slips in a rhyme as if by chance, of how she focuses the lens -- tight and sharp -- if just for a second. Throughout this particular collection, I was drawn by how deftly she can draw a portrait in words ("The Girl Who Died #1") or rally the spirit ("Forbidden Things") or call on the legacy ("J. My Good Friend (another foolish innocent)"). This is a book that always feels good to pick up.
August 19, 2019
An amazing poetry collection, the type that tackles complex topics while using impactful, beautiful, bare-bones language.
Baptism
They dunked me in the creek;
a tiny brooklet.
Muddy, gooey with rotting leaves;
a greenish mold floating;
definable.
For love it was. For love of God
at seven. All in white.
With God's mud ruining my snowy
socks and his bullfrog spoors
gluing up my face.
Baptism
They dunked me in the creek;
a tiny brooklet.
Muddy, gooey with rotting leaves;
a greenish mold floating;
definable.
For love it was. For love of God
at seven. All in white.
With God's mud ruining my snowy
socks and his bullfrog spoors
gluing up my face.
July 24, 2020
in my poet group chat there was a question — which poet would you like to write like?.
before reading this book i didn't have an answer. i have one now and it's alice walker because this book had me from the first page. it wasn't even a poem that got me, it was her intro to the book. that's how much this book spoke to the depths of my soul. hell, i read a preview and immediately bought it. that's how much i love this book.
before reading this book i didn't have an answer. i have one now and it's alice walker because this book had me from the first page. it wasn't even a poem that got me, it was her intro to the book. that's how much this book spoke to the depths of my soul. hell, i read a preview and immediately bought it. that's how much i love this book.
November 30, 2018
I like Walker's fiction more than her poetry, which, in all fairness, isn't saying much because I like all fiction more than all poetry. What makes this little book of poems good to me is Walker's attention to small gestures with big meanings, and to objects and places that carry part of the narrator.
April 11, 2018
While this collection of poems is not as developed as her later poems, many of the themes of family and church, particularly in the first section, resonated with me. Walker's form uses short lines and short poems.
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