As Michael Symmonds Roberts noted when judging last year’s Forward Prize, contemporary UK poetry is drenched. This is perhaps unsurprising given the floods of last summer, as well as increasing concerns regarding global warming and our ecological impact on the planet. But equally, it may well be that poets are naturally drawn to such a recurrent theme. After all, water is our – if not the – fundamental life source and yet is also capable of widespread destruction, embodying all that is fluid, unpredictable and transient; a seemingly abundant source of poetic inspiration. Either way, recent collections such as Sean O’Brien’s The< Drowned Book, Jean Sprackland’s Tilt, and more recently, Stephanie Norgate’s Hidden River, all draw upon – and are drawn to – water, in both its literal power and metaphorical implications.

Paul Abbott’s Flood is a long poem, divided into ten sections. In first-person narrative it tells the story of a fictional disaster’s survivor – a streetwise, well-read, youngish male who talks of HEAT Magazine, D.J. Shadow and ketamine in the same breath as his hallucinatory encounters with the likes of William Blake and John Milton – awaking to find himself floating about a grim, nightmarishly flooded London, a place that is as surreal as it is entirely familiar. From the outset, Abbott makes his poetic model clear: ‘Sweet Themmes runne softly till I end’: a much-quoted line from T.S. Eliot’s devastating vision of early 20th century society, The Waste Land, which in turn was ironically borrowed (the awkward, archaic English of Abbott’s line a seemingly perfunctory nod to this) from Edmund Spenser’s celebratory spousal poem, ‘Prothalamion’. But in Abbott’s line there is no ‘my song’. Instead, the quotation abruptly cuts short, making clear the fate of its speaker: not only will the poem end when it does, but the narrator almost certainly will too. Depressing stuff, but the hell-on-earth that Abbott conjures from the poem’s beginning is even more so: ‘I woke up. / My cold skin was cigarette ash, oh God, / I was outside an officeblock in Greenwich. // Only a loose flutter of nervous pigeons / Waded round a flotsam of plastic cups.’

Such bleak scenes are occasionally – and usually impressively – set off against the grainy drawings of cityscapes that pepper the book, as Gail McNeillie’s artwork captures ‘the Millenium Dome / A giant Ping-Pong ball’ in flood waters, as well as ‘the parapets, / the drownd spires, / the waste / Of London’s Tower’, lending the poem an added dimension. But the problem here is that, like a good song’s lyrics without the music, the poem’s images can sometimes seem a little weak when considered without the accompanying illustrations. Or rather, the inclusion of artwork may have offered a deceptive safety-net to the poet, which in turn seems to have had a detrimental effect on the quality of the writing and image-making. After all, Abbott’s instruction that the reader ‘JUST LOOK!!!’ at the submerged St. Paul’s Cathedral is, whether written before or after the artwork was devised, just plain lazy. The urgency of the capitalisation may be forgivable, but the excessive punctuation is not, and such occasional letdowns are all the more frustrating because Abbott has an enviable gift for describing people, objects and creatures in novel and unusual ways. In section IV, for example, fish spawning are ‘a virtual soup / Of marshmallow tendrils […] like spongy fibres’, while in ‘Milton’s Story’ (sections III and VII give voice to Blake and John Milton respectively, curious twists of perspective that inject the poem with added impetus) the 17th century poet is ‘in a cheap mackintosh / Like D.J. Shadow’, watching ‘each wave grow pregnant as a Dumper Truck […] / [and] the Dead / Like frogs floating in the ocean bilge.’

For the most part, then, Abbott’s descriptive powers more than do justice to his subject matter. But this in turn brings us to the question of what wider significance we are supposed to draw from the poem. For though Blake tells it to us straight in section III, how ‘the atmosphere grew hot as a gas-oven / […] the Arctic iceflows began to crack / Until […] billions of tonnes of brackish water surged in the City streets / [and] nothing looked into its face and lived’, this is little more than an – albeit succinct and vivid – outline of the potential fallout of global warming, already widely hypothesised by scientists and dramatised by filmmakers. Abbott’s may be an impressively rendered and hauntingly prophetic vision, then, but in frequently echoing The Waste Land while at the same time failing to add much to our current ecological concerns, it can occasionally seem to slip into pointlessness and parody. What saves the poem from such a fate and serves to keeps it afloat, however, are Abbott’s wider allusions and thought-provoking juxtapositions of old and new: the potent image of the protagonist stealing a boat and ‘jump-starting its outboard motor’ in a grimy, submerged city, for instance, a million miles from (yet strangely reminiscent of) Wordsworth’s Prelude, or the solemn image of Milton watching ‘the bloodied Ocean […] on Citibank, / Perched, like a cormorant, in the radio mast.’

Along with the poem’s curious layout – mostly justified text in a single narrow column, making it seem like some weird newspaper article cut and pasted into a scrap book from a nightmarish future – it is these novel features that make Flood such a bizarre and unusual read; as beguiling and refreshing as it is otherwise depressing. For while the narrator finally boils and drowns in the inundated Battersea Powerstation – surely one of the worst ways to go imaginable – ‘the orphaning, sweaty haze of the sea’ closes the poem with its refrain of ‘Shhh, shut up, shush’, a deft echoing of The Waste Land’s final Sanskrit mantra: ‘Shantih shantih shantih’. With or without purpose, then, it is impressive flourishes like this that are witty and adroit enough to make up for Flood’s confused raison d’etre.

Paul Abbott, Flood. Clutag Press, £10.00. ISBN 0-9553476-2-9

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.