I loved this book and read it in one sitting on a sunny Sunday. It is a re-imagining of the classic Diary of a Nobody by the Grossmiths and made me laugh out loud.

This is the diary of a year in Brian Bilston’s life, separated from his wife and son, on the downward spiral at work and in the poetry club all the while having to watch Toby Salt and his poetry gain in popularity. Bilston’s peak hit 43 on Twitter in the book although in real life/virtual life he is Twitter’s Poet Laureate. The story is told through poetry and prose and the one thing that Bilston is is a wordsmith and so even the prose plays and throws its toys around. There is also the love interest of Liz who joins the poetry group but Bilston just can’t get over his anxieties to say yes.

Most of all, I really enjoyed the poems. There isn’t one for every day but there are a good number and they are great fun. I love the way other poems and songs that are recognisable are used as structures for re-writing, just like this book, and word play with quite a lot of rhyming. I also loved the different layouts – in an exel spreadsheet, as a dangle diagram for organisational structures, dripping away down the page. It made me want to go out and write a poem but it is much harder than it looks. The rhyming is exquisite.

Monday April 2nd

If your rhyming is stuck and you can’t get by

then you may need the use of a hy-

phen implanted at the end of a line

and soon your poem will sound like a Stein –

way piano in a grand concert hall,

its notes floating in the air like a ball-

oon. So what if the words happen to spill

into two lines? Do not pity these syll-

ables orphaned, adrift, left there to hang;

their beauty is in the way they dang-

le.

I really see this as an anthology of poetry but just with more words as a narrative to link the poems together. You could read it as a story with poems – it depends on your view of the poetry.