This is a thorough, detailed and scholarly exploration and evaluation of Ruth Bidgood's poetry up to and including her award-winning collection Time Being in 2009.Matthew Jarvis focuses closely on the poetry itself. This is not a biography of the poet and he refers to biographical details only where they are needed to explain a reference or development. Ruth Bidgood is an eminent local historian (as is clear from the large number of articles and essays referred to in the bibliography) but these are only cited where they illuminate or underpin the poems. However, it is clear that this is an extremely important part of her engagement with her area. In the case of one group the 'found' poems in Hearing Voices she has actually taken the words of individuals from the archives, where she found an 'emotional charge' in them, and presented them as poems.Quite unusually, Ruth Bidgood did not begin to write poetry until she moved to Mid-Wales in 1965 and was inspired by the area to prolific and immediately powerful composition. From the first, her poetry showed a sense of the landscape as a repository of memory and tradition as well as having an enduring non-human identity.

Early poems deplore uncomprehending and unsympathetic activities such as mass conifer planting, clear-felling and dam-building but Jarvis is clear that hers is no simplistic or sentimental response to the countryside. He refutes any suggestion of Arcadian attitudes to the ";Mid-Wales space which is the generative heart of her entire poetic";.The study provides detailed bibliographies of Ruth Bidgood's publications and comprehensive notes on the author's sources and other critical material. He also includes two interesting unpublished poems and a letter to Poetry Wales which illuminates aspects of her long poem 'Hymn to Sant Ffraid' which was commissioned for Radio Wales.I am not sure if calling her work 'a Mid-Wales Epic' feels right, although the depth and breadth of her involvement with the area is indeed extraordinary. She falls more truly into the Welsh traditions of canu bro. Although an incomer and writer in English, she is indeed a 'bardd gwlad', deeply rooted in every aspect of the place and its community.Caroline ClarkIt is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.

gwales.com , with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com , trwy ganiat'd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.