Ruth Bidgood (1922 – 2022, E) was a poet and local historian, born at Blaendulais, near Neath. She read English at St Hugh’s College in the University of Oxford and during World War II, she served as a Wren, as a coder in Egypt, at Alexandria. After the war she worked in London helping to prepare a new edition of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia. Her poetry is concerned with the people, landscape and seasons of mid-Wales. Resolutely untrendy, she remains outside the metropolitan elite and declines to appear in all-women anthologies.
Books
- The Given Time (1972)
- Seven articles in Transactions of the Radnorshire Society (1974–1980) on Llandewi Hall
- Not Without Homage (1975)
- The Print of Miracle (1978)
- Lighting Candles (1982)
- Kindred (1986)
- The Fluent Moment (1996)
- Singing to Wolves (2000)
- Parishes of the Buzzard (a local history of Abergwesyn)
- New and Selected Poems (2004)
- Symbols of Plenty (2006)
- Hearing Voices (2008)
- Time Being (2009)
- Above the Forests (2012)
- Land Music (2016)
- Lights (2020)