Menna Elfyn: Parch
November 20 - 7:30 pm
Don’t miss this special evening with the brilliant Menna Elfyn – one of Wales’s foremost poets – to celebrate the publication of Parch, her powerful and deeply moving new collection exploring respect, compassion, and the triumph of kindness in a fractured world.
Parch is a landmark publication for Menna and the first to include poems written directly in English, as well as in her own translation.
Parch:
In Welsh, parch (with a guttural ‘ch’) simply means respect. This stunning collection of poems gives voice to those whose liberty or dignity has been undermined, calling for religious, linguistic and cultural tolerance while confronting the effects of (in)humanity on our environment, our histories, and our lives.
Among these are powerful poems responding to sexual harassment, exploitation and violence against women, and to the plight of people caught up in armed conflicts past and present. Mercy is a recurring theme, with poems exploring the tension between justice and forgiveness.
Menna Elfyn shares Nobel laureate 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, and compassion as a force for transformation.
Menna Elfyn is a major figure in contemporary Welsh poetry – she is the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all Welsh-language poets. Her work has been translated into more than eighteen languages, and her voice is by turns challenging and compassionate, unafraid of joy and full of the energies of community. She has published five previous dual-language books of poetry with Bloodaxe, including the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Murmur. Parch is her sixth poetry collection from Bloodaxe, and her first to include poems written directly in English as well as in her own translation.
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Thursday 20 November
7.30 pm (doors open 7.00 pm)
Glamorganshire Golf Club, Penarth
Tickets: £18.00 including a SIGNED copy of Parch (Hardback RRP: £12.99)* / £10.00 Event Only / £5.00 Student Ticket / £5.00 Inclusive Ticket
*Any book not collected at the event will be held in Griffin Books for three months after the date of the event.
