Ruth Bidgood at Ninety

Ruth Bidgood signing books after the reading

I attended a book launch at Aberystwyth Arts Centre recently, held to mark the 90th birthday of the poet Ruth Bidgood. Two books from different publishers were 'launched' (how, I wonder, did this nautical metaphor come to be applied to books?) One of them was Ruth Bidgood's latest collection of poems Above The Forests from Cinnamon Press. The other was Matthew Jarvis' critical appraisal of the poet's work in the 'Writers of Wales' series from University of Wales Press. Both authors were present, Ruth Bidgood to read some of her poems and Matthew Jarvis to be interviewed by poet and critic John Barnie, an interview that occasionally referred across to the poet herself to clarify some factual points arising from the critical discussion.

It was a relaxed event, informally conducted by all the participants. Poems were read before and after the interview and between these the discussion teased out some of the critic's main themes and established a context for the poet's development over a long writing career. Ruth Bidgood has produced much of her poetry out of a deep sense of connection with the landscapes and the communities in the area around the Mid-Wales village of Abergwesyn. One of Matthew Jarvis' contentions is that the main body of the poet's work comprises a developing 'Mid-Wales epic'.

Among the features of the landscape of this area are the large tracts of land covered by dense-growing Forestry Commission plantations of non-native conifers. These sharply contrast with extensive treeless uplands on which sheep are grazed. Ruth Bidgood commented during the evening that she had, after a long life, come to terms with these forests. The title poem of her new collection imagines exploring their dark interiors and finding deep within the remains of human habitation:

… or you might
just miss a cut from rusty chunks
of corrugated roof, propped on dark roots
upheaved by a wind-blow, …

But the final vision of the poem looks back to the formation of landscape by glaciers:

… when, for a moment
you can feel the nothingness
of a million years; when all that seems real
feels like a beginning.

Those two quotes from the poem seem to me to capture the tension that often occurs in the poet's work between the concern with the human presence in the landscape and the sense of the place of humankind in the natural order; typical. too, is the way in which that final phrase catches the thread between these things in a moment of illumination.

Basil Bunting : Briggflatts

Basil Bunting is a poet known primarily for his long poem ‘Briggflatts’. When the critic Donald Davie came to write an account of British poetry in the second half of the 20^th century he called it Under Briggflatts. It is, in fact, a rather late poem, published when Bunting was 66 and after he had returned to his native Northumberland after spending much of his life abroad, in particular in France and Italy where he was part of the circle of Ezra Pound (who published much of Bunting’s early verse in his Activist Anthology). He also lived in what was then Persia and counted Persian poets amongst his influences. Like many of the Poundian modernists he was learned and sought to make new his many influences from Classical and other literature. He was particularly interested conveying musical cadences in verse and also used the analogy of sonata form to structure some of his longer poems. The keyboard sonatas of Scarlatti provided a particular model in this respect. The brief notes to his Collected Poems are occasionally informative, often tetchy and sometimes puzzling. One note on some poems from classical authors states that “It would be gratuitous to assume that a mistranslation is unintentional”. Or the information that “as a native of Paphos, Venus was until recently entitled to a British passport”.

‘Briggflatts’ is written in a distinct though accessible Northumbrian dialect. But sound is important here and he expressed the view that “Southrons would maul the music of many of its lines”. Any ‘southrons’ (or others) who wish to know how it should sound can listen to the clip attached above. This is taken from a film made about Bunting by the BBC not long before his death in 1985. It shows him in the Northumbrian  landscape and at the old Quaker Meeting House of Briggflatts (he expressed the view that silent Quaker worship is “pantheistic”, finding God in everything : “By God with whom I lunched! / there is no trash in the wheat / my loaf is kneaded from.”). The whole film is now available HERE on a DVD, together with a CD of Bunting reading the poem, the text of the poem and some other background material all packaged in a cover showing a page from the Lindisfarne Gospels. In this poem ‘objectivism’ is much more than a technical exercise. His lines here vividly evoke an experience of the physical environment:

Under sacks on the stone

the children lie,

hear the horse stale,

the mason whistle,

harness mutter to shaft,

felloe to axle squeak,

rut thud to rim,

crushed grit.

It is the intersection of experience with the things that are experienced that delivers the poem’s charge. But the objective world is also enacted as an emergence into consciousness and relationship in the early part of the poem. The staging of the erotically charged account of young love is particularly vivid:

He has untied the tape

of her striped flannel drawers

before the range. Naked

on the pricked mat

his fingers comb

thatch of his manhood’s home.

As the poem develops, wider perspectives of landscape and history come into play, back to Norse and Celtic tribes inhabiting this land on the Scottish border. He names St Cuthbert, Eric Bloodaxe and the Brythonic tribes to the north:

Clear Cymric voices carry well this Autumn night,

Aneurin and Taliesin, cruel owls

for whom it is never altogether dark, crying

before the rules made poetry a pedant’s game.

Some have felt that the world evoked here succumbs to that ‘pedant’s game’ in the mannered conclusion of the poem’s coda : ( “ … Who, /swinging his axe / to fell kings, guesses / where we go?”). But this is demanding criticism and does not detract from Bunting’s achievement.

To Praise or to Mock? : Medieval Welsh Poets

There were three identified grades of poet in Wales in the Middle Ages:

Prydydd (High grade poet)

Bardd Teulu (Poet attached the household)

Clerwr (popular poet)

The actual titles vary but these are ones used in the following extract from a 15^th century manuscript [Llanstephan 3], adapted from a translation by D Myrddin Lloyd:

It is not becoming for a prydydd to dabble in material more suited to a clerwr, for such things are opposed to his art. It is the habit of the clerwr to mock and to belittle, and to arouse feelings of shame and disgrace, whereas it behoves the prydydd to praise and to compliment, and to procure fame and joy and glorification. Moreover, the clerwr practises a disorderly art which is not reducible to rule. But it is becoming for a prydydd to concern himself with material suitable for a bardd teulu and to treat it critically, for the art of the bardd teulu submits itself to rule and to the discipline practised by the prydydd. Wherever the prydydd practises his art, it is not right to entertain the disparaging productions of the clerwr for the prydydd’’s song of praise should outweigh such mean effusions.
Incantations, sorcery, and magical practices are not worthy of the prydydd’’s indulgence, and he should not meddle with them. Ancient song of high repute and tales preserved in writing, questions reflecting honour on those who asked them, and replies rendered excellent by art and truth – these are the things that it is good for the prydydd to know when called upon to converse with wise men, to delight young maidens, and to entertain gentlemen and ladies of breeding. For the prydydd’’s art is a portion of natural wisdom and it is derived from the Holy Spirit, and its inspiration is a fruit of genius matched with artistic endeavour.

The interesting thing here is not just that the prydydd is seen as a pillar of civilized Christian society, but that the clerwr is seen as quite other. The clerwr may dabble, potentially, in magic and sorcery, engage in satire and other ‘low effusions’ and, presumably, entertain rather than edify. If it is the works of the prydyddion that have come down to us, would it perhaps have been the clêr who had a more apparent presence for the inhabitants of the oral culture of medieval Wales?