Launch reading with Menna Elfyn, Selima Hill & Kit Wright
Menna Elfyn, Selima Hill and Kit Wright joined us online for this launch event for their October 2025 titles.
Menna Elfyn and Kit Wright read their poems live and discuss their new collections with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Selima Hill contributed audio recordings of her reading from her book.
This free Bloodaxe launch event is now available to watch below or on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/DhDrtmZH58Q
To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links.
Menna Elfyn: Parch
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/parch-1382
Kit Wright: Jug Band Jag
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/jug-band-jag-1381
Selima Hill: A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/a-man-a-woman-a-hippopotamus-1380
*
Menna Elfyn: Parch
Menna Elfyn is the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all Welsh-language poets – until now writing exclusively in Welsh. Her work has been translated into English and other languages by leading poets from around the world.
Following many years of campaigning, Menna Elfyn is moving towards her own sense of resolution as the Welsh language is now accepted and respected as an official language in Wales. In this hybrid book – for the first time – she has written many of the poems direct into English, and translated some of them herself, now describing herself as a ‘proud bilingual’, while she remains a Welsh language poet. Other poems in the collection are translated by Emma Baines, Joseph P. Clancy, Gillian Clarke, Robert Minhinnick and R.S. Thomas.
The poems in Parch offer a voice to those whose liberty or dignity have been undermined, seeking religious, linguistic and cultural tolerance for all, and not shying away from the effects of (in)humanity on our environment, histories and lives. Among these are powerful poems responding to sexual harassment, exploitation and violence against women, as well as to the plight of people caught up in armed conflicts past and present. Mercy is a recurring theme, with poems addressing the tension between justice and forgiveness.
In Welsh, ‘parch’ (the ‘ch’ is guttural) simply means respect. Menna Elfyn’s collection explores the many ways in which respect can be expressed, as well as how our world can so often feel parched of simple kindnesses.
*
Kit Wright: Jug Band Jag
Lovers of Kit Wright’s poetry – for its range and virtuosity, deep feeling and rich humour – may find his new gathering exceeds expectations. Jug Band Jag is a wonderfully spirited bout of poetry-making whose forms and themes are markedly diverse, while the concern for musicality is constant. Whether, that is, he is dispensing the low-down on the Gunpowder Plot, or a ghost story from the world of dry-cleaning, or a fairy tale about ox tongue; reflecting on Hitler as artist, or tracing the frustrations of a career mafioso.
He gives a detailed and moving account of the sinking of the SS Persia during the First World War, in which his own grandmother and her baby were drowned, and traces the curious history of a small Kentish coastal town. A retired classics teacher sings the rivers of hell and of course, a Deep South jug band renders the blues.
Wright’s vision of the world blends the sharply realistic with a distinctive brand of surrealism. Whatever his subject and the tune that he has found for it, these new poems are linked by the quicksilver of irony and the river of humanity that runs through them.
*
Selima Hill: A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus
Selima Hill’s twenty-second book of poetry A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus presents ten sequences of short poems, prose poems and short pieces on relationships and doings between people, animals and the world at large:
Self-portrait with a Bucket: On being an artist’s model.
The Mathematician: A man and woman trying to agree.
A Man, a Woman & a Chihuahua: Different people’s senses of bafflement with each other.
Baby Peter: A homeless man and his mother.
Agatha: An afternoon in a care home.
Room 17: A 70-year-old woman, fragile but determined.
Men in Shorts and Bonkers: Out walking with dogs and their humans.
Until the Tears Roll Down My Cheeks like Honey: Two strangers in a field.
The Surly Mothers of Successful Men: Short pieces of memoir
[10 October 2025]
