New book from Welsh poet Menna Elfyn
Menna Elfyn will be launching her new bilingual Welsh-English collection Murmur with a number of events this autumn. As well as several launches in Wales, she will also be giving two readings in London. The book is published by Bloodaxe on 27 September. Murmur includes 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. Murmur is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. “Her voice is gentle, even tender, but she is far from confining herself to the valleys and mines of her grandparents’ landscape… her points of reference lie far outside the Welsh tradition – to Emily Dickinson and Kurt Vonnegut… and her own travels extend to Cairo and Bucharest.” - PB...