Gommie: I Am Ill With Hope

Published by Salamander Street 2022

Verity Babbs 15/08/2022


On August 4th I get on the coach from London Victoria to Edinburgh and open Gommie’s I am Ill With Hope which had arrived a few days previously in the post. I had saved it for the 10-hour journey, like when you save a nice bottle of wine for when you have guests (or a breakdown) coming. I open it and ask myself – how are you meant to read a poetry book? It feels like when you first get your advent calendar, and have to decide whether you are going to hungrily devour the whole thing or restrain yourself and gift the future-you some small novelty chocolate. But this is a long journey and the book is truly too lovely to practice self-restraint.

The book is a collection of the poems and drawings made by the artist since 2019, including works made during the pandemic lockdowns (which feel sewn into the book’s DNA) and his travels in the months that followed. The joy of this book is that – unlike a novel - you can be transported to the places and emotions Gommie captures with just a glance. It’s as though this book is a slab of ancient amber, the scenes trapped suspended within it from time immemorial. 

The book is accredited to Gommie – and not his legal name Oliver Gomm – which immediately indicates that what the artist is doing with this book (and his practice) is a radical rejection of po-faced traditional attitudes to poetry, authorship, and “proper art”. Gommie is leading the way into a new art world in which such traditional boundaries (art versus poetry, proper versus improper, officially published versus digitally shared) are dissolved.

The design of the book too – often overlooked in book reviews – screams of crossing over into a new art frontier. The book isn’t dense and heavy, with a hard-backed cover like an ageing copy of Bryon – it’s almost magazine-like, with soft pages that welcome rather than challenge the reader.

The comfort of excellent poetry is hearing your own thoughts (often the unrealised ones in your unconscious) repeated back to you in someone else’s words. Reading Gommie’s work is like someone having your epiphanies for you: he has vocalized and pinned them down for your inspection, leaving you with the fun part of mulling them over.

No words are wasted or surplus in Gommie’s poetry. It is as if the artist has had an invisible word limit set with each clause, meaning each word has been chosen specifically and that labour is truly felt in the impact of his sentences.

Gommie has proven himself to be a master of characterization, and his “I am” poems blur the lines between where the author ends and the character begins. As readers we are simply rushed off our feet by this tide of empathy. The pace of the poems moves us like an ancient song, and Gommie demonstrates an unmatched ability to translate strife into beauty.

The introduction to the book mentioned the “shame and confusion” Gommie felt with his relationship with post-Brexit Britain, and the irresistible pull towards watching the news that inevitably led him to despair. This toxic relationship with watching the destruction of our society feels like a deeply British affliction, one which so neatly fits our oxymoronic identity as a nation of self-hating narcissists. Gommie spent 2019 traveling the UK creating artworks, and Britain is one of his favourite subjects and his most potent muse. Rather than turning away from Britain and ideas of Englishness – as many artists do given the country’s grim past and declining present – Gommie dissects the identity of a place which is at once our home and our enemy.

This body of work was made in a really specific moment in British history and this bleeds through into every page of the book. It is remarkable to be given early access to a work that you truly believe will be studied by future generations looking back on the Post-Brexit age.

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