"We're ticking clockwise round the stain / Of Stalin's coffee cup again"
If you're a fan of BBC's The Culture Show, you may have caught the report a few weeks back on the astonishing art and architecture of the Moscow Metro. And if you were left wanting more of this bold, beautiful and rather unsettling testament to the Stalinist ideal, then you really should read Three Men on the Metro.
Spurred on by the apparent cult success in Soviet Russia of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on a Boat, North-East poets Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers are the "lost-beneath-attention men" of the title: tasked with bringing back tales of wonderment from the Moscow underground.
The result is part guide-book, part Alice in Wonderland – full to the brim of experiments in rhyme, sonnet and blank verse, and even the odd micro-work of drama and fiction.
It's studied yet frenetic, with the occasional bolt of Jerome silliness thrown in: there are odes to a shoe half-swallowed by an escalator, to Yeltsin's purge of Moscow's squirrel population, and even to Laika the cosmo-dog. And whereas you might expect to find references to Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky and Pushkin in all this – or even Burns, Coleridge and H.G. Wells – you'll also see modern Russia's fondness for Kylie, Lord of the Rings and SpongeBob Squarepants.
But there's also a stygian darkness to the Metromen's lightning sketches. Not only do they remember the bloodshed of Red October and all that followed, but we're also transported deep into new Russia's Two Nations, in the age of the oligarchs and the Golden Youth: where "the Mobster and the Businessmen" rule; where the underground remains a place of acrid rage and danger, of "vodka's reptile cellars"; where the problems of homelessness, degradation and white supremacy are still rife.
Three Men on the Metro isn't tourist gift-shop fodder, regulated by the powers that be. Like Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch series, these poems engage with the here-and-now intrigues of Putin and Medvedev's Russian underworld, while still retaining "that yielding of Eurydice" in a city whose fiery, caustic history it's impossible not to look back on.
James Hogg |
