Three Modern Drunk Poets: The Reckless Pilgrimage of Des Gorney, Gavin McGulligan and Ogilvy Mace.
Bubble Press, £9.99.

Barman, buy yourself a drink
And get me one while you're there!
Don't feed me your dogma
Hand over that vodka!
Chill the glass at four below
Pour it straight then sip it slow
The coldest heart gives
The warmest kiss
But its aftertaste
Is the bitterest

So Ogilvy Mace wrote in 'The Bar Stool and the Stars', where the West Country poet realises he has no more money left to buy a drink. He tries to reason with the barman by offering him all his worldly and spiritual possessions, from the poem itself to his spare kidney and his pre-pubescent daughter, in return for another measure of the potent clear spirit.

The manic themes of pleasure and pain infuse Mace's work, collected here with his fellow rakes from their famous drinking odyssey of 2002. In that year, Mace, inspired by the debauchery of Baudelaire and Dylan Thomas, joined together with fellow rhymesters Gorney and McGulligan to dedicate twelve months of their life "steeped in the alcoholic madness of the heart" in order to bring their consciousness closer to artistic purity. So the three poets, all hitting 40 years of age, embarked on a tour of the pubs of Britain and the bars of the world.

There were five daily rules.

1. Each poet must be drunk by noon.
2. A poem must be composed by closing time.
3. The poet must not leave the pub until closing time, unless the bar staff eject him.
4. If the bar staff eject the poet before closing time, he must go to another pub.
5. Only alcoholic drinks may be consumed. Water and mixers are banned, but ice is allowed. Food is also permitted.

To pay for the journey, the poets applied to the lottery fund for enough money for travel, accommodation and to keep them "spiritually lubricated" for a one-year period. Of course, the three men denied the press accusations that the Government would be sponsoring three obscure – and all divorced – artists to deal with their mid-life crisis in a rather predictable way. Mace said that he and his friends would create an immortal testament to the decadence and exhaustion of western culture, and not just enjoy a yearlong binge.

In McGulligan's 'Loaded Words', the three poets sit around a table and the first drinks a shot of whisky, while each writes a line of verse on a piece of paper and then passes this to the next poet, who drinks another shot and composes the next line. The poem has two parts to it, the narrative and the final work itself. As the poets get more inebriated, the poem becomes more eccentric and the two narratives intertwine in subject and rhyme.

"I am forged in the fire of your words."

Mace composed, sat back
And supposed McG would lack
The ability to measure up to his
Versifying acumen

"I am caught in the wire of your pen."

In the collection, the trio of ne'er-do-wells journey to Baltimore to empty a bottle of Cognac over Edgar Allen Poe's grave. They go to a Greek Tavern to drink from a monk's skull in honour of Lord Byron, and finally end up in Dylan Thomas's birthplace, Laugharne, relieving themselves over the same cherry trees that the curly-haired Welsh poet favoured as a makeshift urinal.

Mace recounts this touching homage to their alcoholic martyr in 'The Town Still Mad'.

How many troubadours
Muses and paramours,
Surrealists, Realists,
Beg, borrow and stealists
Can we see behind us?
Lining up to empty
Their watery truss
Yet the locals who kicked
The bard from the town
For pissing in the open
Will charge them a pound

The only alcoholic before the odyssey, the Letchworth-born Gorney, writes a confessional and melodramatic panegyric to the joys and sins of alcohol in 'Sordid Heaven'. The poem now possesses a sad and thwarted quality, due to Gorney's untimely death earlier this year, owing to the demon drink.

This demented bread
This voluntary tumour
This mendacious nurse
Let me lay my hands
On your glass curves!

Despite such tragic consequences, what the reader finds in this collection is not the elevation of artistic consciousness, but a two hundred page, eighty-poem strong stream of anecdotes, dedicated to their intoxicating and bittersweet muse. Such self-conscious indulgence becomes tiresome. One feels the poems resemble an argument between teenagers over which of them drank the most the night before.

No strangers to dissenting voices, Gorney, McGulligan and Mace have all, at some point, sat on the committee that awards the prestigious £15,000 Yeovil House trophy to the best annual poetry collection. Incidentally, all three have won the prize. Some, among the poetry rump, have made noises concerning rumours of a boy's club. But I expect these three rogues saw it as similar behaviour to buying each other a round of drinks.

So, two years ago at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in London's Holborn, I met up with the controversial poets to check up on their progress. True to their rulebook, it was lunchtime and all three were drunk. But there was no joy, carousing or deliciously ribald humour among their company. Pallid, sad and hollow faces became them. They looked at one another with a sense of frustration, annoyance and defeat. Gorney privately told me, in what transpired to be our last discussion: "Only three weeks to go, then I'm out of here and I can get down to some real writing."

As I asked after the composition of that day's poem, Mace, seriously blotto and almost incomprehensible, brought out a copy of Palgrave's Golden Treasury. He chose a poem at random – in this case, Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 116, 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments' – and said, in a revealing confession, "I just pick any old piece of verse, move the words around or invert its meaning and hackademics like you write about how I am being inter-textual, post-modern or creating a dialogue with the past!" Although Mace then laughed in my face, I asked if this did not interfere with a certain sense of pride in his professionalism, but he seemed not to hear and thus avoided giving an answer.

Fifteen minutes later, with the poem half-completed on his table, he turned to his companions and said: "Right. That's enough for now." The other two men sighed with delight and Mace added: "Come on, let's find a pub with some better looking chicks."

I guess such behaviour meant I should not have been shocked when I discovered this particular composition, entitled 'Time is no fool', ended the present collection.

Let me block the marriage of true minds
Love must alter to stretch the confines
Of the brief hours and weeks
Along time's warping sickle
So become a poet, O reaper!
The pen gives you the beauty
To use the cachet of your work
In helping score some decent skirt