Title: You Took the Last Bus Home
Author: Brian Bilston
Type: Poetry
Page Count/Review Word Count: 240
Rating: 4*/5
Brian Bilston – You Took the Last Bus Home
Disclaimer: While I aim to be unbiased, I received a copy of this for free to review.
I have a lot of love for this book, and I was torn between giving it either a four or a five. It’s a tough call. Brian Bilston has been described as the poet laureate of Twitter, and his work is known for reflecting the society we live in and for experimenting with form by including poems that are laid out in Excel spreadsheets or other interesting formats.
I enjoyed the vast majority of the poems in this collection – and some of them I’d even seen before – but there were the odd ones here and there that I didn’t rate as highly. Overall, though, it’s rare for me to enjoy a book of contemporary poetry as much as I enjoyed this one, and it’s certainly made me think that Bilston’s fame/notoriety are well-deserved.
It’s also interesting that the author writes under an alias to keep himself anonymous. Bilston, then, is the Banksy of the contemporary poetry world, and it’s remarkable how much Bilston is able to convey with relatively simple language. It’s the same reason I like all of my favourite poets, and Bilston in particular has my attention now. I’ll be reading his next one.
Brian Bilston
