You Took the Last Bus Home by Brian Bilston

Reading Brian Bilston's debut collection of poetry, titled: You took the last bus home, has been a real pleasure. It was by turns clever, by turns witty, and by turns amusing. Bilston found a way to make me chuckle every few pages, and make me go "Ah, I see what you did there!" every other few.

Besides being amusing and witty, Bilston's poems are relatable (for the most part), and he even has some visual poetry - like a poem about flash drives written in the shape of a flash drive, or the one written in an org. chart, or the one written in a spreadsheet or lightbulb or... there were a good few of them now that I think about it.

The most relatable thing about Bilston's poems was that they were about everyday places and situations. So commonplace in fact, that you'd be hard pressed to be unfamiliar. He writes with a bit of cheek about "taking" the last bus home, a bit of wit about the Oxford Comma, and some cleverness in "Refugees" which can be read top to bottom and bottom to top.

There are well over 150 poems in this collection. Some short, only a few lines, and others spanning pages. But be they long or short, every one of his poems is easy to read. I won't lie, I did have to crack out a dictionary here and there to learn new words like osculate and occidental. But after all those poems, I would expect nothing less.

So, all in all, I would say that I enjoyed Brian Bilston's poetry. If for nothing else, for the reminder that poetry has many different forms of expression... and that I too, am a poet.