Abigail Parry has won the €10,000 Ballymaloe international poetry prize with her poem ‘Arterial’. Parry, who was given the award at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin on Wednesday,is a former toymaker and circus skills coach, and currently poet in residence at the National Videogame Arcade.

She received an Eric Gregory award in 2010, was a prizewinner in the Poetry London competition and has twice been a finallist in the Manchester poetry prize. The prize judge, Billy Collins, said: “An actual human heart throbbing along the M4 would seem an ill-advised start to a poem. But what follows is a dazzling bit of shifting between the real and the metaphoric, which lifts the poem to a level of metaphysical play before it descends abruptly into the touchingly real. The reader’s pleasure is keeping his feet under him as the ground rules change.”

The other shortlisted poems – Natalya Anderson’s ‘Dance Therapy’, James Leader’s ‘Phoebe and the Troopship’, and David McLoghlin’s ‘Tom Crean Sings Sean-nós at the Tiller in the Southern Ocean’  were each awarded €1,000 and appear alongside ‘Arterial’ in the spring issue of The Moth magazine.

You can read the winning poem here