Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: poems inspired by the phonetic alphabet

Anna Carteret as Juliet Bravo. Credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo 
issue 07 August 2021

In Competition No. 3210, you were invited to provide a poem or a piece of prose containing words from the phonetic alphabet.

The brief didn’t stipulate that you incorporate all 26 words, but hats off to those who shoehorned them in. In a whopping, wide-ranging entry, with echoes of Keats and MacNeice, and ‘Papa’ Hemingway looming large, Nick Syrett, Nick MacKinnon and Frank Upton shone, but it was a terrific performance all round.

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