Sarah Wimbush, 2023 Competition Adjudicator,
"What Am I Looking For?"
What I’m Looking For
There is something glorious about a poem that stays with you. That is what I will be looking for in this year’s Red Shed Poetry Competition; a poem that has the power to make me catch my breath, to make me laugh or cry, to transport me to another world, another dimension even, I want to feel it reverberate long after the first reading.
I’ll be hoping to see every word working inside your chosen form. I'd like to feel engaged by the musicality of language or stunned by rigorous simplicity. Maybe your poem will explore the ordinary, the exotic, the political, the natural world, or even the downright bizarre. Whatever the subject and however it comes, I hope there will be a quality of invisibility, the mystery that makes a poem active, often called ‘the space between’ or ‘the unsaid’. Most of all, I'm looking forward to hearing your voice - however it speaks - in all its honesty.
Sarah Wimbush grew up in Doncaster and lives in Leeds. Her first poetry collection, Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands, was published with Bloodaxe in 2022. A recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award, she is the author of two prize-winning pamphlets: The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith | Doorstop, 2021) and Bloodlines (Seren, 2020).
There is something glorious about a poem that stays with you. That is what I will be looking for in this year’s Red Shed Poetry Competition; a poem that has the power to make me catch my breath, to make me laugh or cry, to transport me to another world, another dimension even, I want to feel it reverberate long after the first reading.
I’ll be hoping to see every word working inside your chosen form. I'd like to feel engaged by the musicality of language or stunned by rigorous simplicity. Maybe your poem will explore the ordinary, the exotic, the political, the natural world, or even the downright bizarre. Whatever the subject and however it comes, I hope there will be a quality of invisibility, the mystery that makes a poem active, often called ‘the space between’ or ‘the unsaid’. Most of all, I'm looking forward to hearing your voice - however it speaks - in all its honesty.
Sarah Wimbush grew up in Doncaster and lives in Leeds. Her first poetry collection, Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands, was published with Bloodaxe in 2022. A recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award, she is the author of two prize-winning pamphlets: The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith | Doorstop, 2021) and Bloodlines (Seren, 2020).
Sarah Wimbush: Looking forward to hearing your voice.
