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Time Being
| £8.99 |
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’:
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Review from Planet
Bidgood’s sense of the general rightness of things rests in her confidence in the self-renewing capabilities of nature. Nearing ninety, she has achieved a serenity that seems only occasionally troubled by phenomena such as unseasonal heat in “Ice”. In “Five Years On” – a poem whose opening recalls “Tintern Abbey” – she celebrates the recoverability of the past when revisiting a scarcely changed landscape; in “The Scar” she affirms that land’s ability to naturalise the violent alterations made by to it b man. Although a number of poems touch on death, inevitably reminding her of her own mortality, they do so without cutting the ground from under the book’s generally positive cast – testimony to Bidgood’s abiding, Wordsworthian sense of the virtue of her home landscape.
Richard Poole, Planet, Issue No. 199
<p>My father is 91 years old. He has been writing poetry since 1960. But now his eyes are failing, making it difficult to keep writing and, more important, nearly impossible to keep reading. Little by little he has given up newspapers, novels, and anything remotely long-form. In the last year, I have taken to copying some of his favorite poems and upsizing the type to 18pt bold, which he can still decipher. The only Christmas present Dad asked for last December was "Time Being." We ordered a copy mailed here in Chicago. Since then, I have been feeding him a few of the book's poems at a time, enlarged. They are almost all he reads these days. The moments they evoke, the music and choice of words are exactly what give him most pleasure. I am glad for him, and feel it is a gift to be his typist. Thank You to Mrs. Bidgood.</p>
Sarah Johnson
Hello, Thank you for your message. I will be sure to pass this on to Ruth Bidgood. If you would like to hear Ruth Bidgood read one of her poems follow this link to youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjJSG_nrUu0&feature=related Hope you enjoy. Thanks again, The Seren Team