Night River Wood

Night River Wood is an evolving collection of poems, essays and interludes on the subject of nature, place, memory and mystery, written from a hillside on the Welsh borders by writer and artist James Roberts.

Essays and interludes can be found here on the site. Poems and drawings are sent as emails and can also be bought occasionally as printed pamphlets.

Ryokan and the Rooks

by Editor | September 23, 2018 | Journal | 0 Comments

I have a small but growing collection of bird skulls, mostly found on walks in the woods or on cliff-top paths. My favourite is from a manx shearwater. I found it on a clifftop path on Skomer Island, which is home to a hundred thousand of these seabirds in the summer....

A Desertion

by Editor | November 5, 2018 | Journal | 0 Comments

I remember that the sand whispered and sound carried for miles. And dunes the colour of tanned skin - their perfect, female contours. I remember how the desert engulfed the town, dust blowing down narrow streets, gathering and drifting in doorways. There were blue men...

The Oak and the Swift

by Editor | August 18, 2018 | Journal | 0 Comments

Lately I’ve started to pity swifts. They arrive around Mayday every year, appearing over the river in helter-skelter couples. They then form larger groups and spread out over the valley, chasing invisible entities which must be far more important to them than prey....

Offshore

by Editor | December 16, 2018 | Journal | 0 Comments

On the last day of a family holiday I sneaked out of the caravan just after dawn and walked to my favourite spot on the cliff to say goodbye to the sea. The place was near an old stone hut where fisherman used to keep watch for the pilchard shoals coming close to...

Halfway

by Editor | September 7, 2018 | Journal | 0 Comments

The lake is clouded, an almost luminous turquoise. The bottom feels slick, like soaked wood in winter. For weeks the daytime temperature has been over twenty-five degrees yet the water is freezing, fed from the glacier above. I wade up to my waist, then dive. The...

Unremembered

by Editor | November 25, 2018 | Journal | 0 Comments

The cloud is down. My navigation is reliant on the recall of shapes close up: twisted trees, broken walls, mawn pools, the bends and intersections in tracks. In the past week fieldfares have returned, I can hear them now, ransacking the rowans. A small flock of...

The Nocturnal Bottleneck Theory

by Editor | October 21, 2018 | Journal | 0 Comments

The most useful thing I learned in an 18 year education was that a white sheet of paper is never white. I learned this by spending five full days staring at an unmarked A1 sheet pinned to a wall, trying at first to draw, and then to paint it. The exercise was set by...

The Blossom Front Line

by Editor | June 2, 2019 | Journal | 0 Comments

How beautiful they areThe people brushing past meAs I stroll through GionTo the temple of KiyomizuOn this cherry blossom moonlit nightYosano Akiko There is a stretch of road over the border, not far from here, which rolls and curves between acres of orchards. In late...

Old Growth

by Editor | July 1, 2019 | Journal | 0 Comments

Dusk approaches. The hill is windless and quiet. Moorhens carefully crosshatch the surface of the pool wrinkling the inverted images of squall-clouds that have been gathering for an hour. A faint curtain of rain closes across the mountains twenty miles away. I am...

A River of Sound

by Editor | April 7, 2019 | Journal | 0 Comments

Close to its surface a shallow river talks loudly. It's as if the water is passing through many throats, being gulped, gargled and spluttered as it moves over pebbles and rocks, willow roots, rafts of dead vegetation piled against the bank. I propped the recorder on a...