Time Being

Winner of the Roland Mathias Prize 2011

Time Being is Ruth Bidgood''s 10th collection in a career that spans almost 40 years.

It has been said, rightly, that Bidgood''s work is ''emphatically a poetry of location'' and it is the history and nature of her particular region of mid-Wales that most inspire the author. Her narratives are often literally exploratory and discursive, as in ''Viewpoint'' where a walk in the countryside revives both personal memories and knowledge of the stories associated with a place. Her distinctive voice has a quiet authority but also a subtle, conspiratory edge, as if she is letting one in on a secret, unveiling a OP fact, or making a discovery.

She avoids sentimentality, but - unfashionably - not sentiment; an observation can engender joy or sorrow or fear uncluttered by irony. Her descriptions are sharp and memorable, tending to a cool accuracy. Nature is not always a benign presence but also often inescapably dark and mysterious as in ''Illusion'' where "A goshawk climbs a tower of air and is gone". Also notable here are several substantial sequences: ''Gaps'', ''Time Being'', ''Reading a Landscape''. These are ambitious attempts to transcend the lyric and move towards a more epic, multi-faceted form equal to the many experiences of her long life.

Ruth Bidgood was born in Blaendulais, near Neath, educated at Oxford, and worked as a coder in Alexandria, Egypt in World War Two. She has lived in mid-Wales since the mid-sixties. The author of several prize-winning volumes of poetry, she also writes local history.