Earlier this year, almost 100 million people watched the American poet Amanda Gorman perform as part of a ceremony at the very heart of her nation’s identity: the 2021 Super Bowl. Its sheer scale made her previous gig – reading at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration – look like a village fête. Gorman’s Super Bowl poem is, wisely, omitted from Call Us What We Carry, the 23-year-old’s first book-length collection. I wish a few others had been left out, too. At over 200 pages, it’s unusually long for a debut, and the quality wildly uneven. Fame-dazzled editors often misplace their scissors at the very moment when authors most need their help. Gorman is a captivating performer, and a poet of real promise; she’ll one day write a great book, but for now that’s a hill she’s yet to climb.

There’s plenty of visual variety here – a poem printed on a picture of a facemask, one shaped like the Capitol building, one where each stanza is in its own WhatsApp-like message bubble – but a continuity of tone and theme. Half the poems directly address events of the past two years, particularly the US Coronavirus lockdown, a time when “time col    lap    sed” [sic].

Throughout, Gorman uses “we” (rather than “I”), so that each poem can variously speak for the poet, the nation, or all of humanity. That universal address sounds unconvincingly corporate in lines like “As one, we will defeat both despair & disease./ We stand with healthcare heroes & all employees”. In that couplet, the rhyme seems to be too much in control of the line, as it also is in “The only way to correctly predict/ The future is to pave it,/ Is to brave it.” Pave the way to the future, sure, but “pave it”? 

Similes misfire in strange ways:  “Whole months swept by, fast but dragging,/ Like a damp void trapped in the rearview.” Can anything, even a void, be trapped in a car’s rearview mirror? Or this:

Our story is not a circle carved,
But a spiral shed/shaped/spinning,
Shifting inward & outward ad infinitum,
Like a lung on the bank of speech.

I spent a good half-hour chewing over that shifty lung. But these moments of distinctive weirdness are better than the bland, abstract sentiment that can creep in under the flag of universal wisdom:

All we have is time, is now.
Time takes us on.
How we are moved says everything
About what we are to each other
& what are we to each other
If not everything.

That last rhetorical device – an irrefutable rhetorical question, ending with a full stop (‘what is x, if not y.’) – is used so often throughout the book that it loses its impact. “Who are we, if not/ What we make of the dark.” “What are we, if not what we see in another.” “Are we not the animals […] Marching into the ark of our lives.”