Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854114914
Publication date: January 27, 2009
Price: £8.99
Out of stock
WINNER OF THE ROLAND MATHIAS PRIZE 2011
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Time Being is Ruth Bidgood’s 10th collection in a career that spans almost 40 years. It has been said, rightly, that Bidgood’s work is ‘emphatically a poetry of location’ and it is the history and nature of her particular region of mid-Wales that most inspire the author. Her narratives are often literally exploratory and discursive as in ‘Viewpoint’ where a walk in the countryside revives both personal memories and knowledge of the stories associated with a place. Her distinctive voice has a quiet authority but also a subtle, conspiratory edge, as if she is letting one in on a secret, unveiling a hidden fact, or making a discovery. She avoids sentimentality, but – unfashionably – not sentiment; an observation can engender joy or sorrow or fear uncluttered by irony. Her descriptions are sharp and memorable, tending to a cool accuracy. Nature is not always a benign presence but also often inescapably dark and mysterious as in’ Illusion’ where “A goshawk climbs a tower of air and is gone”. Also notable here are several substantial sequences: ‘Gaps’, ‘Time Being’, ‘Reading a Landscape’. These are ambitious attempts to transcend the lyric and move towards a more epic, multi-faceted form equal to the many experiences of her long life.
Listen to Ruth Bidgood read her poem, ‘Cart Burial, Young Adult Female’:
Ruth Bidgood
Ruth Bidgood (1922-2022) was born in Blaendulais, near Neath, educated at Oxford, and worked as a coder in Alexandria, Egypt in World War Two. She lived in mid-Wales.
She published thirteen books of poetry. Her twelfth, Time Being (Seren, 2009), won the Roland Mathias Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. As well as poetry, she wrote a prose book about Wales, Parishes of the Buzzard (Goldleaf, 2000), and published many articles in country historical journals. Her most recent poetry collection was Above the Forests (Cinnamon, 2012), and its release coincided with Matthew Jarvis’s critical study of her work Ruth Bidgood: Writers of Wales, published by University of Wales Press 2012.
