About the Book
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 translated or written many of the original poems in English, now describing herself as 'a proud bilingual'. Other poems in the book 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.
Menna Elfyn shares Herta Mller's belief that 'holding one's own language up to the eyes of another leads to a solid relationship, a relaxed kind of love'. This distils the essence ofParch: respect as refuge; the triumph of compassion over conflict.
Table of Contents:
11 Rhagair | Preface
[I ]
14 Mercy [EB]
19 Gwen [EB]
22 Given to Legend [EB]
25 Marged Glyndŵr [EB]
26 End Note [ME]*
28 Wedi’r glaw | After the Rain [ME]
30 Fermenting – Eples [ME]
32 Silk in Mind [EB]
33 Female Genitals: Camfflabats [ME]
(translated from original Welsh by Gwerful Mechain)
[II]
37 Stones [ME]*
41 Marbled Men [EB]
43 A Ukrainian Mother [ME]*
44 Horse Chestnut tree in Uppsala [ME]*
45 In Solus and Out [ME]*
46 Gauze in Gaza [ME]*
47 Identity [ME]*
49 Nine for Peace [RM]
51 Queue [ME]*
52 Peacemakers [ME]*
(translated from the original Welsh by Waldo Williams)
[III]
57 Parch [ME]*
59 Amen – Amin [EB]
61 H’m – Humming [EB]
62 No Palm Sunday [ME]*
64 Flower Rota for Sunday [ME]*
66 On my way to Albany, NY [JPC]
68 St Patrick of Banwen [EB]
70 St Govan, Pembrokeshire [GC]
71 Salvation [EB]
74 Y Goeden Ellyg, Y Mans, Pontardawe |
The Pear Tree, The Manse, Pontardawe [ME]
76 Storm in Brooklyn Subway [ME]*
77 Keeping Company
[IV]
81 Water [EB]
83 Clap [ME]*
84 A Sheepish Poem [ME]*
86 Brexit Blues [ME]*
88 Old Language, New [EB]
89 Song of a voiceless person to BT [RST]
[V]
93 Last Gilt [EB]
95 Barn Owl [GC]
96 Workhouse Pigeons [EB]
98 Sardinian’s Dream [EB].
99 The Gift of Giving Way [EB]
.
101 Three poems to Ilhan Sami Çomak
101 1 The Piper [ME]*
101 2 Wild Ponies [EB]
104 3 Rowan [EB]
104 Snowdrops in November [ME]*
105 Henrhyd Falls, Coelbren [EB]
107 Honey Moon [EB]
109 Humming with Mam [EB]
111 Nursing Shawl [EB]
112 At Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse [ME]*
113 Dylan’s Parch [ME]*
114 Merch y Gweinidog: Minister’s daughter [ME]
123 Biographical notes
TRANSLATORS
EB: Emma Baines
JPC: Joseph P. Clancy
GC: Gillian Clarke
ME: Menna Elfyn
ME:* Menna Elfyn (written in English)
RM: Robert Minhinnick
RST: R.S. Thomas
About the Author :
Menna Elfyn is one of the foremost Welsh-language writers. As well as being an award-winning poet, she has published plays, libretti and children's novels, and co-edited The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003) with John Rowlands. Her books include two bilingual selections, Eucalyptus: Detholiad o Gerddi / Selected Poems 1978-1994 (Gomer Press, 1995), and Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), a Welsh-only selection Merch Perygl: Cerddi 1976-2011 (Gomer Press, 2011), and two later bilingual collections from Bloodaxe, Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and Bondo (2017).Her most recent Welsh language collection, Tosturi (Mercy), with illustrations by Meinir Mathias (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, 2022), was shortlisted for the 2023 Welsh-language Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award. She was Wales's National Children's Laureate in 2002, and was made President of Wales PEN Cymru in 2014.She was, until 2016, Creative Director in the School of Cultural Studies at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David; she is also Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing.
Review :
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.
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.
The word ‘parch’ holds a double meaning: ‘respect’, in Welsh, and associations of thirst or dryness in English. Menna Elfyn’s new collection dances beautifully in that dual space, shifting between reverence and acting as a record of truth; honouring the past yet also inscribing something new. […] All of which makes reading Parch like leafing through some amazing, modern illuminated text that’s still being written. This is a reverent, resonant, real-life-loving collection that looks backward, sideways, upwards, downwards, and forwards, all at once. A shimmering, sublime gathering of poetic work.
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.
