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“The ale-brown, ankle-deep water, riffling in the shadows of alder, ash and willow, is surprisingly cool. As I feel my way across the shallows with my toes, I spy an up-bubbling in a deeper stretch ... an otter. I strain my eyes until the bubbles disappear, and wade on.” 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. Above all, though, this book stands as a hymn to those fragments of riparian wilderness which on our maps appear as ever-shrinking horns of green amid a white, gridded landscape of human dominance. Riverwise is a clarion call to learn to love and protect the natural world and its waterways.
