Matthew Wall: 'an analogue mind in a digital world'

Greenwich Reach

The Ashburnham Press is pleased to announce the publication of 'Greenwich Reach', three collections of contemporary poetry by Matthew Wall, Robert Cole and Sean Coughlan.

The collections: 'Shorelines' by Robert Cole; 'Generations' by Sean Coughlan; and 'Timesliced' by Matthew Wall, explore themes of love, loss, family, memory and nature, with wit, warmth and pathos.

Quote from Alan Bennett about 'Greenwich Reach': "Thank you for sending me your poems which I enjoyed and (high praise this) understood. I particularly liked 'Timesliced' and 'The Outing' - my sort of subject too I suppose..."

Known loosely as 'The Ashburnham Group' - principally, if bathetically, because they often meet in The Ashburnham Arms in Greenwich, South East London - Cole, Coughlan and Wall share much in common. They are all in their 40s, all family men, all journalists & writers, and all slightly overweight.

To order your copy of 'Greenwich Reach' (£10 plus £2 post and packaging, 64 pages, 42 poems) you can buy online now using PayPal. Just click on the button above and follow the instructions.

For more information about the Ashburnham Group please email greenwichreach@o2.co.uk.

Why 'Greenwich Reach'?

The authors live in the Deptford/Greenwich area of South East London and are great admirers of T.S. Eliot. In his famous poem, The Wasteland, this extract appears:

The river sweats

Oil and tar

The barges drift

With the turning tide

Red sails

Wide

To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

The barges wash

Drifting logs

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.

(from The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot)

'Greenwich Reach' seemed an apt title for their collection.

Apocalyptic

by Matthew Thomas Wall

It’s hard not to feel apocalyptic when

The television screams of storm and flood

And war and guns and death and blood

And famine and drought and tears and diseases

Spreading like wildfire through savaged lands.

It’s hard not to feel apocalyptic when

The newspapers rail against a State

Of lying, bribing, power-mad psychopaths,

Duplicitous warmongers, fiddlers and fudgers,

Demagogue devils in a Parliament of doom.

It’s hard not to feel apocalyptic when

Nature misfires, blooms flowers too early

And dissolves all the seasons in an Alzheimer soup.

The skies grow angrier and rivers burst banks,

All boundaries are broken, all precedents smashed.

It’s hard not to feel apocalyptic when

Decadence drips from every billboard,

Screen and hoarding, lauding our lusts and appetites

Shouting down the voice of grace

And drowning the spirit in a well of noise.

It’s hard not to feel apocalyptic when

Cruelty is dressed up as freedom of speech

And ignorance and prejudice are now become virtues

And courtesy, manners, are trampled, disgraced,

And all is inverted, subverted, traduced.

It’s hard not to feel, it’s hard not to feel

But at least we do feel, at least we do

Feel righteous anger and fury at injustice

And hope and love and shame, and shame,

And shame at just how far we have let things go.

23 January 2007