Bondo

Bondo is Menna Elfyn's fifth poetry book from Bloodaxe. The 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.

Like her previous Bloodaxe titles, Bondo is a dual-language 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.

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. Her 2007 Bloodaxe Books retrospective Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007 was followed by two further Welsh-English collections, Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation; and Bondo (2017). Her hybrid sixth poetry book from Bloodaxe, Parch (2025), combines translations and self-translations with poetry written direct into English for the first time.

'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.' – Deryn Rees-Jones, Co-Judge of the Society of Authors' Cholmondeley Awards 2022

‘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.’ – Carla Manfredino, Wales Arts Review

'Menna Elfyn is the firebird of the Welsh language, bright, indomitably modern and as undestructible as the phoenix. She gives hope to all writers in lesser spoken languages that great things can rise from the ashes.' – Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

'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.’ – Katie Gramich, Planet

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.