Days Like These: An Alternative Guide to the Year in 366 Poems by Brian Bilston (Picador, £16.99)
The poem-a-day format of poetry publishing is ripe for subversion. One suspects the tongue of the “poet laureate of Twitter” is in his cheek when celebrating such wildly various historic occasions as Charles I’s execution, Dylan going electric and … Bilston finding one of his books in a charity shop. He succeeds when he describes the specific in the mundane, such as on TV: “I used to believe that the tiny people in the magic box / were watching me as I watched them – / looking out at somebody else inside a tiny box”.
