Hey Ho

Hello there, Thank you so much for letting us see your entry for our 2014 Women's Poetry Pamphlet Competition. I am so sorry to let you know that your work was not selected on this occasion. Our judge was Amy Wack, who is the long-time Poetry Editor of Seren Press and will be publishing the winner next year. Amy asked me to pass on her overwhelming impression that the standard of submissions was even higher this year than in 2013 and 2012. This may be because you have been refining your manuscripts, adding fresh material and/or redrafting some of your weaker poems. Or it may be that the poets entering this year are a different, more creative and experienced, group of women. Whichever is the case, we all feel excited to think that so many exceptional female poets are 'standing in the wings', as it were, waiting to step onto the stage with a first collection. Amy especially admired the manuscripts she read that had identifiable settings, both in the UK and abroad. And she remarked that there seemed fewer poems this year that tackled traumatic, uncomfortable, or 'difficult' subject matter – she hoped this didn't imply that self-censorship was taking place! She also wanted to stress that the winner this year (now that she knows who it is and has been in touch with her directly) has been writing for many years –steadily submitting poems, steadily recovering from rejection, steadily working on her art, steadily improving... Some of the poems in the winning collection were first written over 20 years ago; so it's well worth archiving your poems, until a time when they can be either redrafted, or given new life as part of a fresh sequence. At which point, we hope to hear from you again. Very best, Debbie T