Merryn Williams admires the seemingly-inexhaustible poetic skill on show in a double collection from Ruth Bidgood
Land-Music /Black Mountains
Ruth Bidgood
Cinnamon Press
ÂŁ8.99
These two collections are printed back-to-back and include an essay by Matthew Jarvis, who has written a full-length study of Ruth Bidgood in the Writers of Wales series.
Bidgood is the outstanding poet of mid-Wales, âremote, solitary, tracklessâ, where there is so much less to distract the mind from eternal questions than there is for city-dwellers, forever bombarded by trivia. This is a landscape âalways beautiful, rarely benignâ, where âwinter seems the only natural seasonâ. The Black Mountains poems, which have been published in earlier collections, draw on the same subject matter. âThe old families are passing, almost goneâ, houses are ruined, churches empty, hillsides scarred by industry and the light railway which serviced the Grwyne Fawr dam torn up. This is a little-explored region which I know well, but the reader doesnât actually need to have been there. âMacnamaraâs Mistressâ is a particularly cold, impressive poem, in which a woman waits without much hope for her lover to take time off from his wife and ride to her isolated home across the mountains. Itâs snowing; she knows that he wonât come this time. She gets drunk on the wine prepared for him and âsags into black sleepâ, feeling that she is obliterated and that no one will ever know her story. But here the story is and we can all relate to it.
Land-Music is a group of new poems and is dedicated to her friend, the poet Anne Cluysenaar, who was murdered in 2014. It is much concerned with death and with what may â just conceivably â come afterwards:
The Train
After her husband died
she told me it seemed to her
he was on a train, huge,
transcontinental, slowly
gathering speed, relentlessly
receding into unknowable distance.
Was destination implied?
No return was scheduled.
Over years she became,
on the surface, much as sheâd been â
many-friended, loving a laugh
(but never happy, she said to me,
never again happy).
Sometimes,
coming into the room, Iâd see her
standing at the window, tense,
concentrating, as if once more
sheâd caught sight of the train,
a hardly distinguishable dot
vanishing into desert
of immeasurable distance.
Darkness is a powerful theme, as in earlier collections, and âHappy Endingâ suggests that âthe darkâ may not after all be our âdestinyâ. âEnigmaâ speculates on what happens âwhen the brain drops into deathâ; do bits of it float free? They can certainly survive in the form of what we now call memes, but a happy ending is more doubtful. We can continue to wonder as we admire this superb book from a writer now in her tenth decade.
by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • authors, books, poetry reviews, year 2016 • Tags: authors, books, Merryn Williams, poetry • 0 Comments
Merryn Williams admires the seemingly-inexhaustible poetic skill on show in a double collection from Ruth Bidgood
These two collections are printed back-to-back and include an essay by Matthew Jarvis, who has written a full-length study of Ruth Bidgood in the Writers of Wales series.
Bidgood is the outstanding poet of mid-Wales, âremote, solitary, tracklessâ, where there is so much less to distract the mind from eternal questions than there is for city-dwellers, forever bombarded by trivia. This is a landscape âalways beautiful, rarely benignâ, where âwinter seems the only natural seasonâ. The Black Mountains poems, which have been published in earlier collections, draw on the same subject matter. âThe old families are passing, almost goneâ, houses are ruined, churches empty, hillsides scarred by industry and the light railway which serviced the Grwyne Fawr dam torn up. This is a little-explored region which I know well, but the reader doesnât actually need to have been there. âMacnamaraâs Mistressâ is a particularly cold, impressive poem, in which a woman waits without much hope for her lover to take time off from his wife and ride to her isolated home across the mountains. Itâs snowing; she knows that he wonât come this time. She gets drunk on the wine prepared for him and âsags into black sleepâ, feeling that she is obliterated and that no one will ever know her story. But here the story is and we can all relate to it.
Land-Music is a group of new poems and is dedicated to her friend, the poet Anne Cluysenaar, who was murdered in 2014. It is much concerned with death and with what may â just conceivably â come afterwards:
The Train After her husband died she told me it seemed to her he was on a train, huge, transcontinental, slowly gathering speed, relentlessly receding into unknowable distance. Was destination implied? No return was scheduled. Over years she became, on the surface, much as sheâd been â many-friended, loving a laugh (but never happy, she said to me, never again happy). Sometimes, coming into the room, Iâd see her standing at the window, tense, concentrating, as if once more sheâd caught sight of the train, a hardly distinguishable dot vanishing into desert of immeasurable distance.Darkness is a powerful theme, as in earlier collections, and âHappy Endingâ suggests that âthe darkâ may not after all be our âdestinyâ. âEnigmaâ speculates on what happens âwhen the brain drops into deathâ; do bits of it float free? They can certainly survive in the form of what we now call memes, but a happy ending is more doubtful. We can continue to wonder as we admire this superb book from a writer now in her tenth decade.