Born in Seven Sisters, Glamorgan, Ruth was educated in Port Talbot
before reading English at Oxford University. During World War II,
she served as a Wren in the Middle East. She was sub-editor of
Chambers' Encyclopedia. After many years in Surrey, Ruth returned
to Wales and settled in Abergwesyn where she started to write poems
and document local history.
Her work has been published in various journals and collections.
Not Without Homage (Christopher Davies, 1975) received a Welsh Arts
Council award; and both Selected Poems (Seren, 1992) and The Fluent
Moment (Seren, 1996) were shortlisted for the Welsh Arts Council
Book of the Year Award in 1993 and 1997. Her New and Selected Poems
(Seren, 2004) was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize in 2005
and Time Being (Seren, 2009) won the Roland Mathias Prize for 2011
and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Ruth is a Fellow of
Academi. A full-length study of her work was written by Matthew
Jarvis. Her previous collections with Cinnamon Press include
Hearing Voices (2008), Above the Forests (2012) and the tête-bêche
double collection, Land Music / Black Mountains. Her latest
collection is the pamphlet, Lights.
Land Music / Black Mountains is a tête-bêche poetry collection
bringing together an important body of themed work with exciting
new poetry by Ruth Bidgood, and with an afterword by Matthew
Jarvis.
Land Music sees Ruth Bidgood writing at the top of her powers.
Fluent, yet unerringly exact, always searching for new
perspectives, we move with the poet from landscape to memories,
each evoked with such precision that we enter them fully. This is a
world in which nothing is insignificant, from the tiles of
pre-Raphaelite girls by the fireside which spell 'the
unpredictability / of beauty's manifestations' to the visual trick
of leaves in the wind that seem to conjure a lizard on a
window-pane, over in an instant so that 'Nothing was left but the
possible, / believable: … sense / of something withdrawn before
fully seen, / a small deprivation.' Above all it is a world in
which land and place are central and will persist:
yet in wilderness places, life,
with a new defiant crying,
might launch again
its tiny assault on the void.
(Defiance)
Drawn from previous collections spanning forty-four years, Black
Mountains represents a strong thread through Ruth Bidgood's poetry,
described by Matthew Jarvis as poems that are 'absolutely
well-balanced, gently languaged into being without fuss or
pyrotechnics'. Never embracing an Arcadian pastoral, Ruth Bidgood
writes with extraordinary depth that is matched by measured
control. One line flows easily into the next taking us to the heart
of places that reverberate with memory and with a sense of how each
moment is inextricably bound with the past.
Praise for Ruth Bidgood's previous work:
“Intensity of attention, to the truth both of what is seen and of
what is felt, is Ruth Bidgood's distinctive quality. ... These are
daring poems, open to speculative thought. And, crucially, they
place truth of experience above the 'dust motes' of convention,
combining deep feeling with keen intelligence.”
Anne Cluysenaar
*Publisher: Cinnamon Press*
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