Menna Elfyn ydw i, dwi’n fardd – I’m Menna Elfyn, I’m a poet. 

And I took part in the British Council’s  South Africa;  One Nation,  Many Voices event in Cardiff on Thursday, as part of the cultural programme for this year’s South Africa focussed London Book Fair.

When asked which South African writer I would like to work with and invite to the event and I immediately said Antjie Krog. I met her in 1990 in Rotterdam Poetry International and we shared similar concerns: at the time of the anti-apartheid movement, we both wrote in languages other than English and both wrote poems about being a woman and mother.

Unfortunately, Antjie couldn’t make it in the end, because of volcanic ash. But I think Isobel Dixon did a marvellous job in stepping in for her. The way that her poetry reflected her early upbringing in South Africa gave us a kind of world view wonder, a hopeful view and something really encouraging because there have been so many negative images from South Africa, so her readings were very beautiful and hopeful.

 If I had to describe the night in two words… in Welsh I’d say ‘goleuedig’ and ‘godidog’, which would translate as enlightenment, and just a sense of marvel, a sense of wonder.

The sense of wonder is one of the salient features of poetry in that, on a night when there are politicians who are battling on the same ground about polices and all those kind of issues, you have poets who have none of that, who go for the particular; politicians go for the general, but here we have poets who represent various cultures; we’ve had poems about beatles and ants, hands and steel workers. All those create a world view that is as enriching as anything that you would get from a political manifesto, and just as urgent.

Menna Elfyn is an award-winning poet and playwright and possibly the best known and most translated of all modern Welsh-language poets.  In April 2010, Sunflowers in your Eyes, an anthology of four Zimbabwean women poets edited by Elfyn, will appear from Cinnamon Press. Recently, she was awarded the International Anima Istranza Foreign Prize for Poetry in Sardinia.