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.

Up Close and Far Off

by Editor | February 19, 2019 | Journal | 0 Comments

I don't remember the name of the town where the railway started, or the destination at the end of the line, only that the train sometimes arrived, but most of the time didn't. I think I waited a week. There were a handful of half-ruined colonial buildings on a single...

Success and Succession

by Editor | August 31, 2018 | Journal | 0 Comments

The path drops steeply via a series of switchbacks, between granite outcrops and boulders, crossing streams that plummet down the mountain. I hear birds whose calls I don’t recognize, their songs mingling with the drone of traffic far below on the road. It is hard to...

Dark Water

by Editor | January 12, 2020 | Journal | 0 Comments

Tonight the river is high. I don’t know what atmospheric conditions out in the Atlantic are driving this endless rain. Like all weather these days it doesn’t seem right. My headlights project two beams across the water, which boils and writhes downstream. Nothing...

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...

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....

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...

Heartwood

by Editor | January 19, 2019 | Journal | 0 Comments

The statistics: it has taken 12 hours to smooth the surface, 4 shifts of 3 hours, first with 60, then 80, then 120 grit paper. Dust gathering on me, my hands following the rings as they appeared from beneath the deep scores made by the chainsaw. I could have done all...

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....

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...

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...