How does Ruth Bidgood use language to convey her ideas?

I met my love by the gas works wall. Dreamed a dream by the old canal. Kissed a girl by
the factory wall. Dirty old town, dirty old town. This vivid and eloquent intertextual
description of the city of Salford immediately situates the poem Walking in moonlight
in the north of England without explicitly naming the city but achieves the same
grounding sense through the use of folk music culture. Bidgood continually expresses
her beliefs on the nature of memory and reflects on the events of life. So disheveled,
polluted and decrepit is the image portrayed by Bidgood of her hometown that the
reader may predict that the speakers memories of the industrial town would be
unpleasant.

However, the discussion of love and song gives a nostalgic emotion to the poem. The
portrayal of Bidgoods life as she sauntered through her hometown immediately
conjures the question with whom she is walking with, the collective determiner pronoun
our could suggest a large group of friends or family but the clich setting of a canal
with moonlight could let us infer it is more likely to be a romantic affiliate who she has
travelled through life with, possibly her husband. This is furthered by the second stanzas
reminiscence of the loves along the way which could imply that Bidgood eventually
settled on one single love after meandering from love to lover through her youth. The
use of this

This reference to age forms part of a larger suggestion that memory is not as reliable as
it first may seem, the speaker seems to say that her unbelievable old age and her
acceptance to looking back creates a pleasant emotion but the use of the lexis
unbelievable to describe her old age makes the reader seem more angry that she is
running out of time in her life. The contradicting sentences just as I thought/ or nothing
like it. shows Bidgoods opinion that memory is limited and that we cannot fully trust it
to be true because even she cannot clearly remember the way in which events
happened or how she felt.

The immediate switch of pronouns between stanzas from our walk to Here am I
could mean that as she became older and lived life she felt more isolated and lonely, this
could signify the loss of her lover or husband, while also making the reader empathise
and also feel lonely themselves. The reversal of the words Here I am to Here am I
makes the reader take longer and ponder her lonely existence, it also reinforces the idea
that her memories have been lost and have to be clawed back in a very animalistic and
desperate way. This paints the image of a lonely aged poet writing about the lost
memories of her life. The deeper fragmentation of the A syndetically listed stony,
slushy, grassy-smooth and the contradictive meanings of the words shows that her
memories are becoming more and more distant and harder to retrieve. To a more
discerning reader it may seem that the poet could be suffering from a mental health
illness such as dementia or Alzheimers, the use of commas between thoughts may
replicate a symptom of the illness where memories become detached from each other
and less vivid. The sibilance in the same line also makes the reader slow down so much
that the words seem to be hesitating before they are read. This is consistent with the
idea that the writer is suffering from some mental impairment due to old age. This
moves into the list that is polysyndetic where the anaphora of this moonlight, this
magical sameness creates a hesitating and disjunct feel, this underpins my
interpretation of the poets mental ability. These seemingly endless lists are ended with
the adjective everlasting shows that although the memories are endless and could
continue forever, the frailty of the human brain gives up in old age. Ruth Bidgood writes
this poem not as an apostrophe to a friend or lover but to her lost memories of her life.
This insubstantial ending leaves the reader reminded that nothing is as predictable as
tonight.