Matthew Jarvis claims that Ruth Bidgood “emphatically deserves recognition as one of Wales’s foremost English-language poets of the last fifty years”, and here poet, local historian and national treasure, Bidgood, gives us an exclusive glimpse into her ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’.
Tonight I’ve escaped
tinsel December and the clinging ghost
of childhood’s candledark morning.
Lord of Misrule, King of the Bean,
I know his domain – twelve days
of ambivalence and power,
when the dead live, and chaos
drums through the dark.
The impossible is warm in my arms.
Through torchlit hours, dusk at noon,
twelve days dance; joy
is believable, joy is now.
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Ruth Bidgood lives in mid-Wales. Her collection Time Being (Seren, 2009) won the Roland Mathias Award 2011. Her most recent collection is Above the Forests (Cinnamon Press, 2012). It was jointly launched with Matthew Jarvis’s Ruth Bidgood (University of Wales Press, 2012).
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