'Some creatures in Broadlands most likely have never been taken into poetry before. Little local lives are here every-where present - lives knelt to and felt under fingertips - the eggs of a wren hidden in a leaf-dome nest in a bramble tangle. Matt Howard's way of seeing, and his plain and yet charged writing of his attentiveness, yields poems that are proof - the finest I've seen recently - that poets might be the best nature-writers of our times.' - Tim Dee, author of The Running Sky

'Matt Howard brings a naturalist's precise eye to bear on the reedbeds and "fen stink" of his native Norfolk. The world that emerges from his marvellous poems does so like a dragon fly from its larval case - strange, fresh, intensely vulnerable. His deep-rooted knowledge of this part of the world lights up poem after poem like the stand of yellow iris he describes in a "manky" stretch of the River Yare. These are poems of hard-won rapture - I came away from reading them grateful for their insights and full of "a new sense of things".' - Esther Morgan

'Matt Howard knows his subjects intimately, and has a gift for illuminating the most fragile and precarious among them, such as the fen raft spider and the 'niche and otherness' of its mating rituals. All human life is part of the same fabric, and these poems shine with insight into our loves and griefs, our capacity for cruelty and joy. In spite of everything, that sense of true belonging in the world is felt "in every part of me, singing".' - Jean Sprackland

'The connection made here between data formally expressed and shared with the research community, and the language and imagery of the poem is what makes Howard's work on the page an exceptional contribution to the ecopoetry genre, and to poetry itself.' - Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian

'There is a benediction hidden amongst the East Anglian reeds in Matt Howard's beautifully constructed new collection of themed poems for Bloodaxe [...] Matt Howard's major concern is to measure a changing landscape by the standard of his Broads own, using close observation, startlingly persuasive metaphors and images that disinter ancient land-uses at every turn [...] A collection that is so comprehensively buried in the soil of its preoccupation, so uncannily attentive to the silent vicissitudes of change and recovery, could never fully be rewarded by a newspaper review [...] Even as early as July, Broadlands must be a candidate for best collection of 2024.' - Steve Whitaker, Yorkshire Times

'He uses poems to probe, to tease apart the generalised picture of 'nature' and makes us stare at what is specific, to share the fascination of intricate, detailed hidden lives.' - DA Prince, The Friday Poem