books

Assorted Poems, News
Some books

It’s December so I suppose I should mention these books in case you might want to incorporate any of them into your Christmas shopping.

‘50 Ways to Score a Goal’ is a collection of poems, perfect for the football obsessive in your life, whether they’re aged eight or eighty (but not thirty-four for some reason).

‘Alexa, what is there to know about love?’ published earlier this year in a splendid-looking hardcover edition. It’s a collection of poems about love (plus a few other things like Brexit and pasta), making it the ideal gift for Sagittarians, vegetarians and Presbyterians.

‘Diary of a Somebody’ is a novel, in the form of a diary, about a complete loser called Brian Bilston (no relation). It also contains over 100 poems and for shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. Goes well with a tomato and basil sauce.

‘You Took the Last Bus Home’ is, at heart, a book with some words in it. Many of these have been arranged into poems along with punctuation marks and the occasional line break. Appropriate for mums, uncles, nephews and sister-in-laws.

And ‘Refugees’ is my forwardy-backwardy poem in picture book format for children. The poem is accompanied by the beautiful artwork of José Sanabria.

They’re available from a bookshop near you. Unless you’re in North America, where generally you can only get hold of You Took the Last Bus Home and Refugees.

Also, you can find all the titles here, alongside some of my favourite books: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/brianbilston

I hope to bring news quite soon of a new book on the way but more on that anon (and on and on).

New books!

Assorted Poems, News

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on here. Sorry about that. Or maybe it’s a good thing. Opinions may vary.

Anyhow, I have managed to publish a couple of new books since my last post. Quite how this happened, I don’t know.

In January, my new collection ‘Alexa, what is there to know about love? published. It’s my first proper collection since ‘You Took the Last Bus Home’. It contains a sequence of poems about love in its different varieties, as well as other, more mundane preoccupations. It looks like this …

And then a few weeks ago, I had a book of football poems for children published. It’s called ‘50 Ways to Score a Goal’. It’s bright green and looks like this …

Both are available through a bookshop near you – or indeed any of those online bookshops that you get nowadays.

That’s it for now. Stay safe and well!

This Bookshop Life

Assorted Poems, Some poems

I’d buy everything from a bookshop if I could.
All my food would come from there.
Atwooden tables I would sit, eating Dahl,
Kipling Tartts or chocolate Baudelaires.
There’d be flat tortillas, focaccia and the rye:
it would be a literary-luncheoned life of pie,
all washed down with a glass of Carver
or a Swift half, if I’d rather.
 
I would make myself an Eco-friendly home:
go Greene and buy recycled tomes.
It Wodehouse a Self-portrait in the attic,
where no-one else could look at it,
and a looking-glass, of course, for the hall,
(amazing how I’ve not changed at all).
My house would Spark delighted looks;
I’d build a coffee table out of coffee table books.
 
I would also buy my clothes from there:
ragged trousers, experimental novel underwear,
dust jackets and striped pyjamas.
Boyd by the comments that I would Garner,
my days would pass quite Harper Lee,
this bookshop life, these books and me.
 

There’s a Supermarket Where the Library Once Stood

Assorted Poems, Some poems

There’s a supermarket where the library once stood.
I sometimes forget that it’s now gone for good.
Last week I asked if they had any Flaubert.
A shrug in response. ‘The cheese counter’s there.’

There’s a supermarket where the library had been.
I’ve been reading some Dhal in ‘Indian cuisine’.
No golden tickets, witches or giants, of course;
just chickpeas and lentils in a creamy spiced sauce.

There’s a supermarket where the library once was.
I had tried to hand back an old Grapes of Wrath.
Sorry, they told me, but it’s really too late,
they’ll be shrivelled and well past their best-before-date.

There’s a supermarket where the library once stood.
A Sainsbury’s Local has bulldozed my childhood.
The library had been starved of state funding, I guess.
Take books off the menu and live well for less.

In Search Of Lost Tomes

Assorted Poems, Some poems

I had forgotten that —
for a long time — I went to bed early,
seduced by Proust,
who so often had le mot juste
about affairs of the heart
and the nature of art,
and all that stuff.

But life and things passed,
gave way to armchaired collapse
in front of a screen,
scrolling through memes,
watching videos of cats.

Until one evening,
when retrieving the remote,
I found you again, on the shelf,
as if stumbling upon a swan’s nest
amongst the reeds, hidden,
your pages like fresh linen.

Written to commemorate the death of Marcel Proust, 18th November 1922.

Beach Reading

Assorted Poems, Some poems

Essential to any beach trip this summer
is Mouna Lellouche’s Obsidian Nights,
an exploration of the self and modernity,

and best consumed in its original Berber,
of course. She’s been gone a year now.
There’s no book that shouts ‘READ ME!’

louder than the waves which crash
upon the rocks than John Phillipston’s
fine new exploration of equine prostitution

in early modern theatre, ‘Tis Pity
She’s a Horse’. I woke one morning
and she’d just cleared out. And, finally,

any time spent relaxing underneath that –
no note, nothing – Mediterranean sun
would be incomplete without the latest –

she’d only taken the little suitcase –
Oriana Malmoud, whose new book,
The Insubstantiality of Things, is a sustained critique

of consumer culture – pizza again tonight –
which, she argues, can only be combated
by a new set of moral imperatives.

BRIAN BILSTON’S COLLECTED POEMS

News

In a break with tradition, I’m not posting up a poem. Rather, I am indulging in some utterly shameless self-promotion. I apologise for that.

I may have a book of my poetry published with the wonderful Unbound. But to make it happen, I’m going to need your help.

Unbound are a crowdsourcing publisher so they only publish things that people want. Whether the people will want my thing is another matter. Anyway, they’ve made a video about Brian and there are a number of “pledge levels” for potential purchases. It’s all here:

www.unbound.co.uk/books/brian-bilston

Thanks for listening. And I promise that I won’t do this kind of thing again.

Brian
x

image

Special Offers

Assorted Poems, Some poems

I took the volume to the counter
where the bookseller said to me,
“You do realise, sir, that today
is Buy One Get One Free.”

So I went and chose another book,
and waited patiently in the queue,
but this time he pointed at a sign
which said Three for the Price of Two.

I thought I’d go for something lighter
and so I came back with a thriller.
The bookseller said, “The Impossible Dead!
That means you get to sleep with Cilla.”

His assistant took me by the hand
and led me into the stock room;
we made love against an unsold stack
of biographies of David Hume.

The bookseller had more to say,
when I returned to the shop floor,
“As the 100th person she’s had this year,
here are the keys to the store.”

He took an urgent phone call and said
“It seems that you’re in luck again.
Head Office have told me to tell you
about “Win One Store, Get the Chain.”

And so it went on for days and weeks,
each special offer bigger than the last,
I won shops, businesses, countries, planets,
my empire was boundless and vast.

It wasn’t easy running the universe;
indeed, every spare moment it took.
So busy was I, no matter how hard I tried,
I never got to read my book.