AUTHOR’S NOTES
JAMES Roberts is intimately acquainted with the landscape of the Wye Valley. Many hours spent walking there and in the Black Mountains have led to the creation of Two Lights, his first full length book. It doesn’t just explore physical landscapes, however – the book is also about his own emotional landscape as he passes through a period of family loss and illness and the way these moods are echoed on a planetary scale as natural habitats are destroyed.
It’s a beautiful, vivid work of psychogeography, pulling in vivid snapshots from his travels around the world as well as detailed accounts of his walks through Wales.
Prior to Two Lights, his work had been almost all short form – poems and essays have been published in many journals and he has his own micro press, Night River Wood. As well as being a writer, he’s an accomplished artist who created the illustrations for Two Lights.
“Two Lights developed over several years in my imagination, perhaps the full 20 years that I lived in the area that the book revolves around,” he says. “My relationship to the community of life that surrounded me deepened in that time and a sense of loss developed from that relationship, that felt like a form of twilight.
“It’s impossible for me to look at the green uplands of Wales and not see what they once were and could be again.”
He adds that not long ago he was walking on a moor in the area and in two hours witnessed only four birds.
“These places should, of course, be alive with them,” he says. “At the same time there is an incredible beauty in those landscapes. The sculpted terrain has always been an inspiration for my work as an artist and poet. The book grew from