By Merryn Williams
I first met Ruth Bidgood (1922-2022) when I was a struggling new poet and she was one of the most eminent Welsh poets in English. We shared a love of the "green desert" of mid-Wales – ruined cottages, ever-changing weather, high hills you could ascend into a "cold kingdom of black bog and rock." She had retreated to the tiny village of Abergwesyn, where she lived quietly, after several silent years in the Home Counties and a painful divorce.
Her language was always plain and clear, what Wordsworth called "the real language of men." Here is a short poem which expresses piercing sorrow through the simplest images:
Elegy for Sarah
Bitter apples load the tree
by a girl’s grave
in a tangle of summer weeds.
Small wet apples glow
through summer rain.
"My days are past"
she cries from her stone,
"my purposes are broken off" –
apple bough broken,
fallen in dripping weeds.
"even the thoughts of my heart."
My thoughts, my purposes, my days
broken among weeds,
and summer rain falling
on wet stone, bitter apples.
That’s exactly how it feels, standing near a crumbling Welsh church in the rain thinking of the lives that have ended. She was interested in exploring, not so much the hilly country itself, as landscapes of the mind:
Acquaintance
It was from a border county of my life
you crossed into another country,
having never settled. Smoke rose one dawn
from the overnight house for which
your thrown stone transitorily defined
a patch of my waste land; but soon
the hut was derelict. Acquaintance ending
seems not to warrant uneasier weather
than a fraction of wind-change brings;
yet over my moors the sky sags now,
black with irrational certainty
of departures. From your hasty thatch
rushes loosen, blow east. The heartland may be next
to know depopulation.
A relationship which never became a close friendship is described through images of the sparsely populated land around Abergwesyn. And next thing you know, her family is about to break up.
Ruth immersed herself in local history and wrote wonderful poems about obscure and vanished people - servants, small farmers, a man who emigrates to Australia and a man who doesn’t ("Emu’s Egg"). She wrote too about the great subjects of darkness and light ("Driving through 95% Eclipse"), about the threats to, and from nature ("Slate Quarry, Penceulan"), and restrainedly about her deep love for a man who died ("Voyage"). She never talked much about herself, so after her death and with the permission of her children, I explored her previous life as a girl in Port Talbot (where Richard Burton was a schoolmate), a Wren in wartime and a 1950s housewife. The poetry came late, coinciding with her move back to Wales, and although she went on writing well into her nineties the great poems belong to the Abergwesyn years. It turned out that this little patch of earth yielded an inexhaustible subject, and I find myself re-reading her poems constantly and with growing admiration.
You can read more about Chosen Poems by Ruth Bidgood, with a memoir by Merryn Williams, here.
