P G Wodehouse might have made fun of poets in his stories, but he didn't in the least despise verse: anyone who's ever read one of his books will know how much he enjoyed quoting the English classics in inappropriate contexts, and anyone who knows anything about his writing career will be aware that he was a highly successful Broadway lyricist around the time of the Great War. He always had a very sharp ear for rhyme and metre.

This collection of comic verse is mostly taken from Wodehouse's very early newspaper days, between around 1903 and 1907, together with a couple of poems that appeared in later stories (like the immortal nature poem "Good Gnus", which is written by Charlotte Mulliner in "Unpleasantness at Budleigh Court"). The newspaper poems deal with issues of the day: ladies' cricket, the craze for bridge, the post-Reichenbach revival of Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells's comet, and so on. Prominent are the "Parrot" poems, part of a daily sequence printed in the Express in Autumn 1903 as an ironic commentary on the Free Trade debate of the moment, and owing more than a little to a certain American bird famous for perching above doors.

As you would expect, this is hack work, written at speed to fill empty columns, with the expectation that it would be wrapping fish the next day, and it doesn't really survive being printed in a book a century later. Everything is a parody of one kind or another, with the footprints of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and — above all — W S Gilbert visible on every page, but here and there you can see the glimmerings of original Wodehouse humour beginning to shine through.

The introductions by Auberon Waugh and Frances Donaldson are pleasant, but don't say very much (and what they do say overlaps rather!); the cartoons by David Langdon are fun, although he's rather anachronistically chosen to caricature Wodehouse as he was in his seventies, not as the sporting young man of twenty who wrote most of these poems.

Not a must-have book, but still quite a nice addition to a Wodehouse collection. ( )

There's one about an umpiring incident in a ladies' cricket match