PROSPERO AT BREAKFAST by Alan Wickes

Still, you tame the matinee; gradually
the sniggering kids grow hushed, and by the end
they clap and cheer to set an old magician free.

______________________________________

Alan Wickes' Prospero at Breakfast 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 /author, Blood Brothers: New and Selected Poems)

________________________________________________________

Staple Bound Chapbook
21 Pages
Originally published by Modern Metrics Press