Photo Credit: Bernard Mitchell
In the wake of the recent passing of one of Wales’ finest poets, her friend and fellow poet Merryn Williams shares some words about Ruth Bidgood
It was on a rainy day in the Black Mountains, looking for something to read, that I picked up a battered copy of Ruth Bidgood’s second volume, Not Without Homage, and was enthralled. I hadn’t written any poetry since my teens, and thought I never would again, but this poet, whom I’d never heard of, instantly spoke to me.
I felt very much at home in her landscape. Mountains, ruined cottages, little-known churches, silence, standing stones and the tiny marks we leave behind before we disappear. Ruth, who was a local historian as well as a poet, often wrote about the vanished people – paupers, shepherds, copper miners – ‘who lived here and are not remembered’ (‘Hawthorn at Digiff’). Their lives were very hard and the landscape, which tourists think beautiful, is not sentimentalised. When it grows dark, this landscape can swallow you whole (but was still the only place where she wanted to live). Many of her poems are about combating darkness and depression, and the value – in the poem of that name – of ‘lighting candles’. She recalls Indian women making the apparently futile gesture of launching little lighted boats at night downstream:
Tonight, lighting candles, I think
of the dark faces, the dwindling lights,
night closing back, the water
black again, reflections gone,
boats all sailed away, and the prayers
now rising from some further reach
of the sacred river.
Humanity will survive, though not without pain, is what her poems keep saying.
I asked a mutual friend to introduce us and, although we belonged to different generations and lived miles apart, Ruth and I exchanged countless letters over the years. I was honoured to be part of her circle. She had lived through a war, and had a great deal of sorrow, but was always calm, kind, polite, uncomplaining, never shouting about herself or her work. I shall miss her and always wish I had asked her more questions, but her poetry is still there, to be constantly read and re-read.
TO RUTH
(Ruth Bidgood, 20th July 1922- 4th March 2022)
You told me how, in 1941, you
walked with your boyfriend through Port Meadow
not far from Thames, and watched the nesting moorhens,
not talking much, not asking what came next.
You vowed you’d write, you did exchange long letters,
and he survived but married someone else.
And now it’s war
again, not that it ever stopped, or will.
The lovers cling to each other
in tears, before just one gets on the train –
young men not allowed to cross the border –
and time winds back, the scene is just the same.
Two students walk, him with his call-up,
and you a girl the age of Sophie Scholl,
across a field of memory, and it darkens.
Now your light grows frail, I’ll remember.
Merryn Williams