No one who saw President Joe Biden’s inauguration last January will forget inaugural poet Amanda Gorman. Striding confidently to the microphone at the U.S. Capitol, dressed in bright Prada yellow against the cold, her upswept hairdo crowned by a bold red headband, Gorman recited her poem “The Hill We Climb” with forthright diction and musicality. That musicality was accompanied by eloquent gestures, her hands keeping a steady beat yet adding varied emphases or sculptural air-arcs to underscore her poetic points and phrases.
Now Gorman, only the third Black inaugural speaker (after Maya Angelou and Elizabeth Alexander), has published her third best-selling book: first was a handsomely presented copy of “The Hill We Climb,” the second her uplifting children’s book Change Sings (with illustrator Loren Long). Call Us What We Carry is actually her second full collection, after 2015’s The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough. Quite a remarkable resume for a Harvard graduate (with honors), still only twenty-three years old, who’s already served as a National Youth Poet Laureate. While raised in Southern California by a single mother, Joan Wicks, Gorman has a Sacramento family connection: her proud grandmother, Bertha Gaffney Gorman, now retired, served as a reporter for the Sacramento Bee.
With Call Us What We Carry, Amanda Gorman confirms what many of us suspected after her inaugural reading: she is an authentic poetical genius. Call Us exhibits a many-layered, multi-media variety of poetic approaches, arranging strong visual presentations of line and stanza, evoking tactile sensations, yet always anchoring the poems upon rhythms and sonorities. These are quite speakable poems. But merely saying this does not do justice to her poetic individuality. What’s most remarkable is how Gorman sweeps up huge tracts of English and American poetical history in her verse. Her techniques include “shape” poems modeled after the seventeenth-century British poet George Herbert, as in “Essex I,” but the lines, arranged in the shape of a giant whale, are an homage to a sunken American whaling vessel (which inspired Melville’s Moby Dick). In its verses, “Essex I” distills the terrors of that ocean voyage to an extended metaphor on our imperiled and imperfect democracy.
Elsewhere, Gorman flexes her muscle and displays her eclecticism. Even the epigraphs she chooses (those little snippets of quotation whereby poets suggest what triggered a poem) are significant: Gorman is well acquainted with the work of Canadian poet and Greek scholar Anne Carson, whom she quotes on the connection between elegy (poems of loss) and history. Gorman’s alliterations (identical first letters of successive words) and rhymes, whether end-rhymes or internal rhymes, will evoke hip-hop for many listeners—a perfectly valid take—yet she may also be influenced by the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verses of Beowulf. She is undoubtedly shaped by such Black poetical ancestors as Lucille Clifton and Langston Hughes, especially Hughes’s moments of verbal jazz, yet the voice is Gorman’s throughout.
Gorman’s intellectual curiosity and flair for history inform a sequence of authentic diary excerpts by World War I soldier Roy Underwood Plummer, a corporal in a Black regiment of Army engineers. Typewritten entries on lined official notebook paper (photographed) by Plummer precede what must be superimposed verse lines by Gorman, crafted to mimic Plummer’s exact antique typeface. Here, too, Gorman’s command of multiple themes is on view: as elsewhere in the book, we learn about pandemics, and about flaws and failures in our democracy, including but not limited to systemic racism. So we read Corporal Plummer’s words on the 1918 Spanish influenza, juxtaposed with Gorman’s allusions to Covid-19:
[Plummer:] Date 1/20/19. Much colder. Epidemic, said to be the “Flu” raising sand with Co. “A”. Quite a number are sent to the Hospital.
[Gorman:] Gulps of our lives.
Gurgling from our treasured chests.
Going, going, gone.
Gestures like these tell us to look for other signs of Gorman’s presence: she is listed as co-designer of the book with Jim Hoover. She appends proper scholarly notes on borrowed phrases or other uses of source material, thus aligning her volume with culture-shaping predecessors like T.S. Eliot, who annotated his own The Waste Land. Like Eliot, she is staking a claim as “individual talent” engaged in altering the “tradition.”
Much of the book is properly concerned with the Black experience in America, but there is much else to ponder: like Walt Whitman, Gorman contains multitudes.
But in a capsule review like this one, we should hear directly from Amanda Gorman, in lines from her inaugural “The Hill We Climb,” and feel a surge of hope,
even the ghost of a millenary belief in a promised earthly paradise:
We lay down our arms
So that we can reach our arms out to one another.
We seek harm to none, and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew,
That even as we hurt, we hoped,
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together. Victorious,
Not because we will never again know defeat,
But because we will never again sow division.
I feel certain that if Emerson had lived in our time and absorbed our modern context, he would say to Gorman, as he did say to Whitman, that this is one of the finest pieces of wit and wisdom our country has yet known.
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From the Publisher
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| The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country | Change Sings: A Children's Anthem | Call Us What We Carry | |
| Read everything by inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman: | Amanda Gorman’s powerful and historic poem “The Hill We Climb,” read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition | A lyrical picture book debut from Amanda Gorman and #1 New York Times bestselling illustrator Loren Long | The breakout poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman |
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A beautiful book from a brilliant woman
Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2021
I ordered this book on Joe Biden's inauguration day because I wanted to be one of the first people to get one. Eleven months later, I am thrilled to finally have a copy!Ms. Gorman's poems are as beautiful and moving as I had hoped. I love how she arranges a number of them in unconventional shapes, as in my photo. I'm attaching that photo partly because another reviewer mentioned the typeset being small, but I disagree.The hard cover book is lovely and very well constructed. This book would be a meaningful gift for any poetry lover. Heartily recommended.
Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2021
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Audrey Rosser
Bought as a present for my Grandaughter
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 10, 2022
