Selected Poems by Ruth Bidgood

Selected Poems Reviews

• 
  Billy Jones

  Bidgood's poetry bristles with social engagement. Rural Welsh space is the locus of meteorological and psychological upheaval, as well as the object of aesthetic appreciation. Bidgood writes of appreciation but against naive, idyllic, sentimentalised notions of Welsh ruralism. Her poetry is explicitly anti-pastoralist, and the essential condition of Welsh rural life and the natural landscape of Wales for her seems to be a deep awareness of and proximity to death.
  
  Indeed, she also throws into question the very idea of rural landscapes as 'natural' environments as such. These are landscapes which have, after all, been tended, looked after and cultivated for generations; they are the product of generational labour, something that can be overlooked amid the fawning adulation of these places.
  
  Bidgood's vision of the rural is undeniably dark, reminding us of nature's brutal indifference. Her poetry broods on rural decay, her landscapes are derelict (sometimes unpeopled), and the communities that now occupy them are haunted by the once-living places that they were. The past bleeds into the present, but Bidgood's lamentations are, in a sense, an active effort to work against the dilapidation found in the present - even if that dilapidation does form the precondition for a large portion of her poetry.