Little Poems About Authors

I spent this evening at the Penguin Bloggers' Night, which I'll write about properly next week - lovely to see the old guard (as Kim described us on Twitter!) and to meet some new faces - and, of course, to hear the authors read extracts from their forthcoming books.  More on't that soon.

The writers mural at Barter Books, Alnwick

What I'm writing today, instead, is somewhat fanciful... on the train home, I started to craft little poems about authors.  Some sincere, but mostly frivolous.  I thought you might enjoy reading them - and that, hopefully, they'll inspire you to follow suit (either in the comments here, or on your own blogs.)  Here are the four I made up on the train journey!  Do have a go; it's fun, and makes you feel a bit like you might be Dorothy Parker's new best friend.

George Eliot; or, Asking for Eliot in a Bookshop
Who'd have guessed, dear Mary Anne,
Your efforts to be thought a man
Would lead, in the next century,
To: "Sorry, sir, T.S. or G.?"

Virginia Woolf
The Angels of the House you slew,
And buried in decorous graves,
Leaving (with arched eyebrow) you:
The common reader who made waves.

Philip Larkin's Legacy
Oh Larkin, yes, you swore; that's fine.
But no-one knows the second line.

What's troublin' ya?
I am glum; something's marred me.
Life is hard; I am Hardy.