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menna-elfyn-bondo

Menna Elfyn

Bondo

Menna Elfyn

Publication Date : 26 Oct 2017

ISBN: 9781780373881

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Menna Elfyn's Bondo is her 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.

'Menna Elfyn is a major figure in contemporary Welsh poetry, writing exclusively in Welsh. A true internationalist, her work has been translated into over eighteen languages. Her most recent bilingual collections in Welsh and English are published by Bloodaxe. Elfyn writes about the intimate and every day, the natural world and about women’s experiences, always able to transform her awareness of the small, and the beautiful, to the affective and often, then, the political. Her voice is challenging and compassionate by turn, unafraid of joy, and full of the energies of community, offering through the power of language, truth, consolation, and possibility.' - Deryn Rees-Jones, Co-Judge of the Society of Authors' Cholmondeley Awards 2022

‘If there is a poet addressing important issues about language today, it’s Menna Elfyn in her latest collection of poems, Bondo (Welsh for ‘eaves’). There’s no tub-thumping in the book though; the poems are a quiet call for the reconciliation of diversity, a reminder that cultural nuances are what make life meaningful.’ – Carla Manfredino, Wales Arts Review

'Menna Elfyn is the firebird of the Welsh language, bright, indomitably modern and as undestructible as the phoenix. She gives hope to all writers in lesser spoken languages that great things can rise from the ashes.' – Nuala Ní 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

 

Menna Elfyn: 'Handkerchief Kiss'

Menna Elfyn reads her poem 'Handkerchief Kiss' / 'Cusan Hances' in English and Welsh from Perffaith Nam / Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems 1995-2007 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007). The English translation of this poem is by Joseph P. Clancy. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley, which includes four poems from Perffaith Nam / Perfect Blemish read by Menna Elfyn in Welsh and English.

Bilingual Welsh–English edition


 

  

BOOKS BY Menna Elfyn

Murmur

Menna Elfyn

Murmur

Publication Date : 27 Sep 2012

Read More   amazon.co.uk
Parch

Menna Elfyn

Parch

Publication Date : 23 Oct 2025

Read More   amazon.co.uk
Perfect Blemish / Perffaith Nam

Menna Elfyn

Perfect Blemish / Perffaith Nam

New & Selected Poems 1995-2007 / Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007

Publication Date : 25 Oct 2007

Read More   amazon.co.uk
The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry

Menna Elfyn

The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry

20th-century Welsh-language poetry in translation

Publication Date : 29 May 2003

Read More   amazon.co.uk

Related News & Publicity

News & Publicity


Menna Elfyn on BBC Radio & featured in Wales Arts Review

Menna Elfyn on BBC Radio & featured in Wales Arts Review

Menna Elfyn's essay The Demetae: Unearthing Britannia's Tribes on Radio 3; feature in Wales Arts Review; Radio interviews on Woman's Hour and The Verb & new poem on...

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