Wow! eBook
Ruth Bidgood
Author(s): Matthew Jarvis (Author)
- Publisher: University of Wales Press
- Publication Date: 15 Jun. 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 200 pages
- ISBN-10: 070832522X
- ISBN-13: 9780708325223
Book Description
This is the first full-length study of the poet Ruth Bidgood, who is best known for her long-term literary engagement with the landscape and communities of the mid-Wales region she has made her home. Considering her entire career to date, this volume provides detailed scrutiny of Bidgood’s poetry from its genesis in her formative discovery of mid-Wales in the 1960s to her 2009 prize-winning volume Time Being. Whilst acknowledging the breadth of Bidgood’s poetic work, this book argues that her most important achievement is her creation, over many years, of what has become nothing less than a mid-Wales epic.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘With its persuasively argued thesis, that Ruth Bidgood’s twelve poetry collections compose in effect one integrated epic poem in praise of mid Wales – its history, its inhabitants, its traditions, and its landscape – this thoughtful, thoroughly researched book casts new light on its subject. Bidgood’s achievement stands out clearly from its pages, which ring true, like her poems.’ –Professor Jane Aaron
Ruth Bidgood is a poet of subtle complexities. It takes a particularly sensitive and incisive critic to do her work justice. Matthew Jarvis is such a critic and, in its attentiveness to language and environment, this volume in the Writers of Wales series is a major contribution to the study of Welsh poetry in English. Jarvis’s superbly attentive readings should lead to a broader appreciation of Ruth Bidgood’s distinctive contribution to Anglophone poetry. –Daniel G. Williams, Swansea University
About the Author
Matthew Jarvis is the Anthony Dyson Fellow in Poetry in the School of Cultural Studies, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
