flood

Illustrations to FLOOD by Paul Abbott. Click on an image above to view the full illustration

		Paul Abbott's poem FLOOD, published by Clutag Press, is a 'Waste Land' for the twenty-first century, a timely and daring debut in the disaster genre, by a twenty-one-year-old in his final year at Oxford.
		Streetwise, slangy, irreverent, intensely self-aware (and well-read), the poet-speaker steals a boat (in very un-Wordsworthian circumstances), jumpstarts its outboard, and survives long enough to tell his tale 'Of London, of Global Warming, of HEAT magazine... of squalid Thames... and of its fall'. The shades of William Blake and John Milton - ghost writers - act as Virgilian guides, ushering him towards 'the first day of the rest of my death', at Battersea Power Station (the service entrance to hell).