Bondo

by Menna Elfyn, Elin Ap Hywel (Translator), Gillian Clarke (Translator)

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.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 9, 2017

Reviews

[Carl Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems, in Welsh—though translated into English on each facing page for people like me—range from whimsical to ironic, exploring belonging and diversity, ambiguity and reunion.

Bondo—Welsh for eaves—explores the nuance of culture and the way language both shelters and defines it—that is the subtlety that makes the difference

“Each day ends triumphant
in a coming home;
but home, we know, is where
we leave from:
hatchlings raise the latch and go."
—from “Benediction of Eaves”