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Menna Elfyn is the best-known, most travelled and most translated
of all Welsh-language poets. The extraordinary international range
of her subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of
vision place her among Europe's leading poets. This bilingual
edition of her later poetry includes work from "Cell Angel" (1996)
and "Blind Man's Kiss/Cusan Dyn Dall" (2001), as well as the first
English translations of "Perffaith Nam" (2005) and a selection of
new poems. 'These poems engage as deeply as ever with Menna Elfyn's
treasured themes of possession and dispossession, the terrible
vulnerability of those things which are precious and her joyously
affirmative, inclusive views on how they may be protected. Her
characteristic concern for humanity everywhere and her loving but
uncompromising view of the conundrums of women's lives are framed
here in a more reflective vein, but with her characteristic humour
and sideways wit. She is a witty, gentle, compassionate gatekeeper
between Wales and the wider world, her work as a poet constantly
explaining, excusing and extolling each to the other' - Elin ap
Hywel. 'Menna Elfyn is the firebird of the Welsh language, bright,
indomitably modern and as indestructible as the phoenix. She gives
hope to all writers in lesser spoken languages that great things
can rise from the ashes' - Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. 'Elfyn is a poet of
healing...both compassionate and celebratory. Like a soul doctor
she questions and probes, like St Teresa she endures the darkness,
but in the end she sings a song which affirms that flawed humanity
is indeed perfectible' - Katie Gramich, Planet.
Bondo is Menna Elfyn's latest collection in Welsh and English. Her
title means eaves in Welsh, referring to poems about getting close
to language as sanctuary. Other poems were written episodically
over a number of years. These meditative poems began simply as a
personal engagement with the grief of Aberfan, expressing
solidarity with a nation's wound. Bondo is also the voice which
echoes the role of the Welsh bard as remembrancer. Menna Elfyn is
the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all
Welsh-language poets. The extraordinary international range of her
subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of vision place
her among Europe's leading poets. Like her previous Bloodaxe
titles, Bondo is a bilingual Welsh-English edition. Again, the
facing English translations are by leading Welsh poets, in this
case Elin ap Hywel, Gillian Clarke, Damian Walford Davies and
Robert Minhinnick. It is her first new book since Perfect Blemish:
New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad &
Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007 and the later collection Murmur (2012), a
Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.
Welsh is the oldest surviving Celtic language, and the most
flourishing. For around fifteen centuries Welsh poets have
expressed an intense awareness of what it is like to be human in
this part of the world in poems of extraordinary range and depth.
And despite the global tendency towards homogenisation, Welsh poets
have fought back, drawing inspiration from both the traditional and
the contemporary to forge a new and rainbow-like modernism. This
wide-ranging anthology of 20th-century Welsh-language poetry in
English translation - by far the most comprehensive of its kind -
will be a revelation for most readers. It will dispel the romantic
images of Welsh poets as bards or druids and blow away any
preconceived mists of Celtic twilight. This poetry is full of
vitality, combining old craftsmanship and daring innovation, humour
and angst, the oral and the literary. The selection brings together
poets of every hue: from magisterial figures like T Gwynn Jones, R
Williams Parry and Saunders Lewis to folk poets such as Alun Cilie
and Dic Jones; from cerebral poets Pennar Davies and Bobi Jones to
popular entertainers Geraint Lovgreen and Ifor ap Glyn. There are
Chaplinesque poets, rebellious and subversive ones, lyrical voices
and storytellers. The variety is enormous: from Welsh performance
poetry to song lyrics; from the wry social comment of Grahame
Davies to the contemporary parables of Gwyneth Lewis, who writes
different kinds of poems in Welsh and English. This exuberant
chorus of voices from the margins of Europe proves that poetry in
this minority language is far from stagnant. Poetry Book Society
Recommended Translation.
Menna Elfyn's collection Murmur is full of murmurings - in English
and Welsh - such as the need 'to walk the earth as if there's a
baby sleeping next door'. Murmur is a poetry of meditation, from
the reverberations of dead poets to murmurs of the heart which
force the poet to dwell on the irregular beat of the poet's lot.
Distant sounds too are heard from captivity in a sequence of poems
about the last princess of Wales, Catrin Glyndwr, daughter of Owain
Glyndwr, who was incarcerated with her children in the Tower of
London for over two years until their mysterious death. Fittingly
enough, "mur-mur" in Welsh also means "wall-wall", so the book's
leitmotif is one that stresses the distance between words and
worlds - and the way poetry is a language beyond language which we
can sometimes only grasp through sound. Menna Elfyn is the
best-known, most travelled and most translated of all
Welsh-language poets. The extraordinary international range of her
subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of vision place
her among Europe's leading poets. Murmur is her first new book
since "Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam:
Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007", and includes
translations of poems by Welsh folk hero and poet of peace Waldo
Williams (1901-71) which challenge the notion of the Celtic
melancholy and testify to a 'hesitant hope'. Her own poems have
facing English translations by leading Welsh poets: Elin ap Hywel,
Joseph Clancy, Gillian Clarke, Damian Walford Davies and Paul
Henry.
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