Jim McElroy “Coming of Age”
A poem by the 2021 winner of the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, Jim McElroy, has been awarded a top ten prize in one of the world’s biggest and most prestigious competitions, the 2025 National Poetry Competition.
Run by The Poetry Society, the ten were selected from over 21,250 poems entered by nearly 9,600 poets from 113 countries. All the poems were read anonymously by the judging panel – Denise Saul, Ian Duhig and Susannah Dickey – then whittled down to a longlist of 133 poems and 108 poets, from which the ten prize winners were announced at the National Poetry awards in London on 25th March.
Commenting on the inspiration for his poem, ‘Coming of Age’, Jim said – ‘I was six years old when I witnessed what happens in the first stanza as our Simmental Bull enters the yard of my childhood in the Mourne Mountains. Last year I thought I’d have a go at turning the memory into a poem. ‘Coming of Age’ is the result. I’m thrilled it’s been recognised amongst such a competitive field.’
In her awarding citation, judge Susannah Dickey said – ‘this poem achieves a boisterous, gorgeous synthesis of the transcendental and the downright gross, its turns of phrase pulsing with the guts of the non-human, reminding us of our simultaneous distance from and proximity to other forms of mammalian life. How do we understand our own obsolescence if not in the context of the bodies we rear and destroy? This poem challenges the reader with the unlikely farce of our survival, the random nature of nature’s persistence – the writing is witty, precise, vile and sublime.’
‘Coming of Age’ was one of seven commended prize-winners at the National Poetry awards. Overall winner on the night was poet Partridge Boswell from Vermont in the US for his poem ‘The Gathering’, second prize went to ‘Axe’ by Damen O’Brien from Brisbane, and third to ‘Badminton’ by Zoe Dorado from California.
‘Whilst I didn’t make the top three,’ Jim said, ‘as my poems have been longlisted three times in the past few years, it feels like progress to have made it to the top ten this year.’
Since it began in 1978, the National Poetry Competition has been an important milestone in the careers of many leading poets, with previous winners including Sinéad Morrissey, Ruth Padel, James Berry, Medbh McGuckian, Jo Shapcott, Stephen Sexton, Tony Harrison, and former Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.
Jim’s poem is included below and all ten prize winning poems can be read on the Poetry Society link
https://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/national-poetry-competition/
First published in 2018, Jim McElroy’s awards include the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, the Francis Ledwidge Poetry Award, the Mairtín Crawford Poetry Award, the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition, and Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series. Second-prize winner at the Bridport Poetry Awards and double awardee of Individual Artist Awards from Arts Council NI, his poem ‘Unmaking His Chair’ was nominated for 2022 Irish Poem of The Year. His chapbook, We Are The Weather, is published by Smith|Doorstop, and the Portuguese edition, O Clima Somos Nós is published by Traça Edições.
