This year's prize for the best sonnet goes to Alan Wickes' 'Barcelona' for its elegant use of all aspects of the form, while at the same time employing a language perfectly at home in the 21st century to range from ra-ra skirts, to Caravaggio, to 'Those Were the Days', culminating in the real poignancy of the closing couplet.

Martyn Crucefix, Competition Adjudicator, Ware Poetry Competition 2004

 Barcelona: Editor's Choice of Mike Alexander, ' The characters that people this poem, a parade of prostitutes, a duo of street musicians, & of course, the travellers who witness the nightly procession without admitting their obvious complicity, wander the stage like Dantean shades. Although the poem shows us the darker side of Barcelona after dark, its tone is like a pop song, "up-beat & strangely phrased," & all the richer for its strange phrasing.'

"Barcelona" is a Baudelairean city sonnet, which begins with a striking image of palms as caged giraffes. The "caged" aspect of that image leads on to other negatives like patched, drab, and faded, but there are also pink light, beauty, and music. The atmosphere is tawdry, sad, exotic, and romantic. This well-executed sonnet is a bit confusing as to point-of-view. The opening lines are generalizing and observational. Then we have a close-up of a beautiful girl, and must decide whether she is one of the patrolling prostitutes: line 8 perhaps says that, though she is pale and sickly, her beauty contrasts with the other hookers passing by. Then the sestet gives us music -- the forced gaiety of a Beatles tune -- and the speaker is no longer an observer but part of an inclusive "we." Is the speaker now to be seen as one of the parade, or as one of their customers, or simply as a deluded member of humanity?

Richard Wilbur, The Distinguished Guest, Eratosphere, May 2008

Alan Wickes' Prospero at Breakfast also relies on the reader's cultural knowledge to point its argument. What an imaginative triumph to locate the exiled magician-duke not on stage, but to place the actor, with his "rehearsed panache", on tour in his digs.....The ironies of this contrast are pointed by the use of precise detail: so Prospero's cell is a "spruced-up" Laura Ashley room and his magic the breakfast squeezing of "two cups from one tea bag".

Roger Elkin, Competition adjudicator, Envoi International Poetry Competition 146

Where MacRae is unassuming, Alan Wickes is unashamedly ambitious and clever. It is a joy to take his "Excursions in Greeneland," a sonnet sequence where all but the initial sonnet are named after books by the novelist Graham Greene. One might perhaps need to be a greater fan of Greene than I to mine the poem's deepest delights, but I had no such trouble with the allusion rich double sonnet for Berryman, "Dream Song."

Who knows better the travesty of horror,
the perfect peace beyond enticing edges,
the garden where your nightmare first begun,
Father slumped, stock-still next to his gun.

Wickes also wins my deep admiration for his facility with one of my favorite forms-- his very fine rondeau sequence "Recurrences":

I'm sketching you, it always comes out wrong--
I cannot capture how the sunlight falls
across your shoulders like a white lace shawl,
I'm back to where I started.

........Aficionados of those who enjoy the "modern idiom within a formal verse setting" that Wickes proclaims as his preferential style will savor this collection like an elegant crossword.

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