Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854111708
Publication date: September 19, 1996
Price: £5.95
Out of stock
The Fluent Moment is Ruth Bidgood’s seventh collection and follows 1992’s well-received Selected Poems.
Her intense response to the landscape of Powys combines with a constant curiosity about the inhabitants of the place, their histories and personalities. Yet far from being merely ’local’ these poems transcend circumstance to embody universal spiritual values.
There are many fine shorter lyrics such as ‘Starlings’, ‘Dancers’ and ‘Bluetit Feeding’. There are fascinating portraits where living or historical figures come to life, such as the formidable grandmother in ‘Sian Fach’ and poems that detail adventures and journeys like ‘Up to the Twdin’. The longer works of several sections here, ‘Six Houses’, ‘Land’ and ‘Into the Dark’ allow the author a larger canvas for her reflections and reveal a new breadth and ambition for this widely admired poet.
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.
