Tom Hammick: The Making of Poetry

Hammick works across paint and print, often creating worlds in which reality and imagination intertwine. Saturated in colour, these prints evoke that same interplay. The Making of Poetry, written by Nicolson and illustrated by Hammick, tells the story of a significant period in British poetry: the year of 1797-1798 when William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived, explored and ruminated over the Quantock Hills in Somerset.

Following in their footsteps, Nicolson and Hammick trod the same ground, experienced the same landscapes and immersed their thoughts in their writings, in an attempt to relive and understand the poetry to which the Quantocks had given birth.

With timber sourced from the park at Alfoxden, where the Wordsworths lived during the year in Somerset, Hammick created woodblock prints based on the poems and experiences of these first three English Romantics. Alongside Nicolson’s account of following in the poets’ footsteps, often day by day throughout the year, the woodcuts cross the boundary between the physical and the metaphysical, the sensed world and the imagined world, often engaged with the experiences of the solitary walker, at other times intensely social, by moonlight and at dawn, as the snow fell and in the full light of the most blessed summer they ever experienced.