Menna Elfyn's dual language Welsh-English collection Murmur is full of murmurings, 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 was 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 (1904-71) 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 P. Clancy, Gillian Clarke, Damian Walford Davies and Paul Henry.
Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation
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 poetry books include two dual-language 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 dual-language collections from Bloodaxe, Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and Bondo (2017). Parch (2025) is Menna Elfyn’s sixth poetry book from Bloodaxe. For the first time in this collection, she has written many of the poems direct into English, and translated some of them herself.
Optimist Absoliwt: Cofiant Eluned Phillips, her biography of the poet Eluned Phillips, was published (in Welsh) in 2016, and Cwsg: am dro yn ôl, a book about sleep illustrated by Sarah Williams, in 2019, both from Gomer Press. 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.
When not travelling the world for readings and residencies, she lives in Carmarthen. 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. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2022, a prize which recognises a poet's body of work.
