Riverwise: Meditations on Afon Teifi

Riverwise, a volume of slow river prose centred around Afon Teifi, is a book of wanderings and wonderings, witnessings and enchantments, rememberings and endings. Weaving memoir, poetry and keen observation into its meandering course, it shifts across time and space to reflect the beauty of hidden, fluvial places, and to meditate on the strangeness of being human. Along the way, hosts of things glimmer on the water and resurface from the depths: characters, creatures, plants, ruins, roots and words, all bound and etched together in the liquid slate of Teifi's ceaseless becoming. As new questions are asked beside old, half-forgotten streams, currents conjoin into an unexpected narrative.

Jack Smylie Wild is a poet, nature writer and award- winning baker. Born in Aberystwyth in 1989, but mostly raised on the edge of Dartmoor, he has been moving between Wales and England for thirty years. It was from his home in Buckfastleigh that as a teenager Jack began wandering, and writing about, the moors and its rivers. He has been captivated by wild spaces ever since, and in 2011 won the Write It, Make It Happen award, which financed an expedition to Central America to write a collection of poetry about the remote cloud forests of Nicaragua. After studying philosophy at Cardiff University, he made a permanent return to his country, and county, of birth, settling in Llandysul with his partner Seren. It was here, jobless and with time on his hands, that he began to heed the calls of Afon Teifi - to explore her length and breadth; her creatures and her catchment. Jack now resides in Cardigan, with his wife and two boys, a stone's throw from the river he loves.