Writer and artist James Roberts on how his book Two Lights is ‘a field memoir, a travelogue, and a praise song to the wild’.
For almost two decades, I lived at the foot of a high hill overlooking the River Wye in Wales. I’m an obsessional walker, and the hill provided many paths, with views of the Black Mountains to the south, the Brecon Beacons to the west, and the Herefordshire orchardlands to the east. At the top is a common called The Begwns, an undulating ridge with ever-changing light. Squalls rush in, light pours down in blades, pools in the fields, then fades. A place of wild theatre.
When I first visited, I thought I’d arrived at the bleakest place on earth. It was a day of low mist, bone-chilling cold, and a silence I’d never witnessed before. Spooked, I almost turned back. But then something happened: the mist shifted, the curtains opened, and in front of me was a flock of thirty lapwings, swoop-diving over the bracken and gorse. I’d never seen lapwings before. In the deepest sense of the word, I was smitten.
Words are a little like birds. They change shape, fold and flicker. Smitten is a good example. In its 13th-century form, it meant “to be visited by disaster.” Three hundred years later, it meant “to fall in love”, suddenly, dramatically. In these times of climate crisis and biodiversity loss, being smitten by the wild takes on both meanings. Two Lights is a book about being smitten—by wonder, and by grief.
That first day on the hill, I also heard a curlew for the first time, far in the distance. It was late March, and they were returning to their upland breeding grounds, as they have for millennia. Over a few years, I got to know those shy birds, and I began to write about them.
Poetry
Poetry is the form I always return to. In those days, I would take stones from the hill, paint poems on their surfaces, and place them back where I’d found them. It felt like a reciprocal act. Some were placed in the forks of old thorn trees or slipped between the stones of ancient burial cairns. I’d revisit them sometimes, and I often found a few words had partially faded away. One flat stone had been used as a perch by blackbirds who had nested nearby; their pecks and scratchings had “edited” the poem. How I saw the place was not how they saw it and perhaps they thought the correction necessary. This is the most rewarding form of self-publishing.
As time progressed, the words gathered into longer forms. Essays appeared, which were sent to small publications run by people whose writing I admired. One essay imagined the journey of dawn, starting in the Bering Sea and sweeping across Asia and Europe, finally arriving at my little house on a Welsh hill. It followed the calls of tufted puffins, red-legged kittiwakes, citrine wagtails, flowerpeckers, and honeyeaters. That piece, titled Chasing the Dawn, was read online by the editor who later commissioned Two Lights. It became the book’s first chapter.
Two Lights
Two Lights uses twilight as a prism to examine our place on this challenged earth. It records what is fading—but also the wonder of what remains. The book is a field memoir, a travelogue, and a praise song to the wild.
A walk becomes words, becomes a poem, becomes a story. The story grows. This is my process. My work is rooted in place and in community, human and wild. I don’t know how to write any other way.
One section of the book began with an encounter with a lone cygnet that had chosen to stay on an upland pool into winter. I visited most days, worried about its survival as the cold descended. On some evenings, as I left, the stars would appear, and the constellation Cygnus would be visible in the northwest—that vast swan, thirty light-years across. The micro and macro became the warp and weft of the book. Most of the stories begin on that few hundred acres of hill, but they travel great distances.
The cover of the new paperback edition features my painting of curlews in flight—one of the three pairs on the hill that often failed to breed. They’re tiny in the frame, surrounded by a large meshwork of tones and textures, almost like stars seen in negative. I think the image fits the words.
I’m still smitten by a high hill and its birds, though it’s a different hill now, east of where Two Lights was written. There are skylarks and golden plovers, yellowhammers, redstarts, red kites. Our house is overlooked by trees that host a noisy colony of rooks and jackdaws. The surrounding woods are home to blackcaps, chiffchaffs, flycatchers, crossbills. The world feels like it’s turning faster now. We seem to be in descent. But the wonder is still there, everywhere. Another book is beginning to grow from this place.
(c) James Roberts
You can read more of James Roberts’ work on his Substack: intothedeepwoods.substack.com. You can see his art at seariverwood.com.
About Two Lights by James Roberts:
An extraordinary account of searching for the wildness left in our world – spanning continents and geological eras, mountains and oceans, animals and birds, the skies and the stars beyond
With dizzying acuity and insight, Roberts paints a portrait of a life and its landscapes, creating precious connections with wild creatures and places, from swans in the Cambrian Mountains to wolves in the Pacific Northwest.
By walking at dawn and dusk, in the two lights of awakening and deepening, through the stripped, windswept hills of Wales, and the jungles and savannahs of Africa, he navigates from a soul-stripping sense of loss towards hope in the future. In the presence of wild creatures he finds a way back to life.
Order your copy of Two Lights online here.
Readers may also be interested in articles by Rachel McKenna and Richard Nairn on Writing.ie.
