Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman review – vigilant, truthful
From the moment Amanda Gorman started to speak at President Biden’s inauguration, on 20 January, the effect was spellbinding. A graceful young woman in a brilliant yellow suit, speaking to millions – she seemed like sunshine itself, bathing the audience in her light. That performance of her poem, The Hill We Climb, had star quality – and her words, pressing for national unity and reconciliation, soared. The sentiments might not have been out of the ordinary but their delivery was. “The new dawn blooms as we free it./For there is always light,/ If only we’re brave enough to see it./If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Gorman is brave enough to be it. And to be able to perform at a political gathering and at oncelift up and move an audience in this way is rare – the legacy of Martin Luther King needs no labouring. She is now celebrated as a US national youth poet laureate and could even be described as the country’s dazzling new secularpreacher. For, as her poem Cordage, or Atonement, puts it: “Poetry is its own prayer,/The closest words come to will.”
I found it difficult, reading Call Us What We Carry, to separate the poetry from the remembered image of that inauguration recital. Fending for themselves on the page, some of thepoems appear incomplete – like unaccompanied minors, waiting for their guardian’s return. They ask to be read aloud. The collection is ardent, committed but uneven. Gorman’s hallmark is also, at times, her weakness: she cannot resist words that echo one another. “Shall this leave us bitter? Or better?” (The Shallows); or “As we become more akin/To kin,” (Back to the Past) or “This book is awake. This book is a wake.” (Ship’s Manifest). When she pulls it off, it is musical: there is a sense of exalted wordplay – sounds as soulmates. But as often, the echo is empty and does not deliver enough meaning. Having said this, she nails a political point in describing the US’s early Covid days, in At First, as “Unprecedented & unpresidented.”
Gorman makes a virtue of telling rather than showing. The poems are emotionally primed and have an aphoristic momentum. And while some images do not quite come off (“Hope is the soft bird/We send across the sea”), the emotion always does (“We have lost too much to lose”) and one is grateful for her uncompromising take on the tragedy of the pandemic and the wrongness of living apart.
Elsewhere, poems such as Fury & Faith are powerful reiterations of black lives mattering, peaceful rallying cries. She makes sure you know where she is coming from (sometimes in the most profound sense – as a descendant of slaves). History is her spur: she enterprisingly takes the testimony of Roy Underwood Plummer (1896-1966) and uses his soldier’s journal to perform historical ventriloquy. In her vigilant, truthful poems about Covid, it is as if she were taking the temperature of the times (feverish, often courageous, sometimes sadly lacking a pulse) while also not neglecting to plunder the past to reflect upon other viruses that might inform our experience (she alludes to the famous Aids quilt and has extensively researched Spanish flu). And it is striking how often the image of a ship appears (we were, after all, in our separate ships metaphorically during lockdown).
Poems such as Fury & Faith are powerful reiterations of black lives mattering, peaceful rallying cries
On the Good Ship Gorman there is never any doubting the shining intentions of the skipper.She is, throughout, playfully experimental. One poem is shaped as a supine whale, another an American flag and there is a poem in the shape of a face mask that ends with the line: “Who were we beneath our mask./Who are we now that it is trashed.” In Fugue, she exults “Even now handshakes & hugs are like gifts”. But she is right in The Unordinary World to express uncertainty: “The worst is over/Depending on who you ask”. For the curious thing, beyond Gorman’s control, is that many poems already seem past their sell-by – or (to play her game) their celebrate-by – date. The masks have not, after all, been trashed and there will be much more for this extraordinary woman to write.
• Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman is published by Chatto (£14.99). To support theGuardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply