Parch by Menna Elfyn, trans. Emma Baines, Gillian Clarke, Menna Elfyn, Robert Minhinnick and R.S. Thomas
Bloodaxe Books
Published 23rd October 2025.
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 written many of the poems direct into English, and translated some of them herself, now describing herself as a ‘proud bilingual’, while she remains a Welsh language poet. Other poems in the collection 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 Müller’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 of Parch: respect as refuge; the triumph of compassion over conflict.
Menna Elfyn has published five dual-language books of poetry with Bloodaxe. Her 2007 retrospective Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems was followed by two further Welsh-English collections, Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation; and Bondo (2017). Parch is Menna Elfyn’s sixth poetry book from Bloodaxe, and is her first book to include poems written direct into English and in her own translation.
‘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.’ – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
‘’Storm in Brooklyn Subway’ is almost an imagist poem; it’s a reminder of Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, that rarest moment of underground revelation in modern poetry. Elfyn’s rich sense of verbal music is a bonus, and enables her to skim between worlds – underground and overground, sacred and secular – and, perhaps, between words. It seems that the interplay of Welsh may have helped produce lightning and luminosity in Elfyn’s English-language poetry.’ – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian, on a poem from Parch
'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
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