Broadlands
A generous and intimate reflection on the natural and human world, grounded in the reedbeds, meadows and marshes of England's Norfolk Broads.
The poems of Matt Howard's Broadlands are closely and thrillingly observed from real encounters, inviting us closer to the more-than-human world, its violence, fragility and wonder. Yet the human is always and all the more present; here too are poems of desire, love and grief. They are poems of the field, imaginings from the conservation of habitats restored and created, working with and for all their constituent species - for we now live in times where everywhere is in some part within the gift of the habitat of the human heart and mind. Redefining what a sense of place might mean, the lyric energy of Broadlands rises from a labour committed, 'set on this floating ground'.
Broadlands is Matt Howard's second collection, following his debut Gall (2018) from The Rialto, which won the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection andthe 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize.
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'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
