Three Tyneside poets reject vodka

Never - ever - looking a gift horse in the dentures, Paul Summers, Andy Croft and Bill Herbert must have been pleased to see a big feature in the Newcastle Journal about them and their (and our) book Three Men on the Metro. We were too. You can read the full article via their own blog, http://tribrodyagi.blogspot.com/. Tribrodjagi is Russian for three vagabonds or wanderers, though the trio look more like a group of polytechnic lecturers on an away day than vagabonds to me.
Returning to the Journal article, our trio are referred to as "Tyneside poets" - which caused the Teeside member to faint. The article also says that their "vodka fueled exploits" are the "talk of the poetry world". Well, you'd have to drink one hell of a lot of vodka to keep up with some poets I know. The book is claimed as having sixty Pushkin sonnets, hmm, not really. Jerome K Jerome (an inspiration for the book) is marked as being popular from his visits to Russia, though he didn't go there. And the book is a big hit in Albania. We hope the book is selling well in downtown Tirana, but doubt it as Albania broke with Russia in 1960 and Moscow is not exactly a hot topic there. But it is a great piece otherwise.

The Russians are coming

Poets Andy Croft and Bill Herbert, two of Five Leaves Three Men on the Metro can be heard talking about their adventures in Moscow on the latest edition of The Strand, the daily arts bulletin on the BBC World Service.

To listen to the broadcast click on www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsn3. The Russian version is on www.bbc.co.uk/russian/radio/radio_5etazh/2009/10/091025_5floor_zinik_metro.shtml.
Three Men on the Metro brings together the weird and wonderful exploits of poets Andy Croft, W.N. Herbert and Paul Summers as they journey from the Newcastle Metro to its Moscow counterpart. With only a tatty copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat – a cult classic in the Soviet Union – for company, the trio soon become the typical idealists abroad: lost underground and going in circles. The poetry that followd is inspired by their two weeks adrift in a foreign land, in a Metro system as renowned for its stunning artwork and architecture as it is for its trains.