Alan Wickes is a storyteller. His poetry explores place, character and situation with a cinematic sense of atmosphere and telling detail. The poems' settings reflect his travels, across the Mediterranean particularly, but also in North America. Although the setting is contemporary, at times depicted from a point of view mediated through a lens or recast on-screen, his characters are archetypal - a noir-style sleuth and his femme fatale, the lone traveller, an abandoned lover - romantics unwittingly marooned in postmodernity. Technique too mixes the contemporary and traditional. Diction and...