Broadlands

The poems of Matt Howard’s Broadlands are grounded in the reedbeds, meadows and marshes of the Norfolk Broads. They 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. Rooted in their locale, but ever ranging elsewhere, to midwives on St Kilda, the Wordsworths and their cuckoo clock in Grasmere or with a virtuoso sedge warbler, singing in a patch of Norfolk reedbed of all the places we share, mimicking the songs of companion species, across continents, deep time and flyways with ‘the cosmic web condensed in his head’. Redefining what a sense of place might mean, the generous and intimate 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 and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize.

Table of Contents:
11 Stand in Late May 12 Reedbed 13 Nest Surveying I, 17/4/17 14 Cults of Broadland 16 Queen Wasp 17 See how the rotary ditcher is 18 Fen Meadow 19 Another Murmuration 20 The Pond 21 Nest Surveying, II, 17/4/17 22 Marbled Orb Weaver 23 Rides 24 Parasitoid and Host 26 The wood is too far a walk now 27 Apocrypha I 28 First Nightingale 29 Loke 30 Wade’s 31 The Dreams of the Salmon Farmer and his Wife 32 The Biology of Spiders 33 Cat’s Eye 34 The Stag at the Gate 36 Hock 37 Second-hand smoke 38 Sedition Song 39 An Acte for the preservation of Grayne, 1566 40 Chemical Chorus 41 Ridge and Furrow 42 Tench 43 Teneral 44 Earthstars 45 Apocrypha II 46 Displays 48 Swallowtail 49 The germ of the world is one place 50 Spores 52 Ballomania 53 Neurone 54 St Mark’s Flies 55 Odonatologists’ Anecdote 56 Amen 57 On the restoration of the cuckoo clock at Dove Cottage 58 Horse chestnut 59 Apocrypha III 60 On the snail in medieval manuscripts 61 Courtship 62 We all have needs 63 Purple 64 Reedbed in August 65 Trespass Song 66 Familiars 67 Sedge Warbler 68 Where four-spotted chasers make a window in the fen 69 Exuviae Survey 70 Nettle-tap 71 Though the singing season’s done with

About the Author :
Matt Howard was born in Norfolk in 1978. He is a poet and environmentalist who worked in various roles for the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) for more than a decade. His debut collection Gall was published by The Rialto in 2018, winning the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection in 2020 and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize. His second book-length collection, Broadlands, is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Matt co-founded The RSPB and The Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition in 2011 and was co-editor of Magma 72 The Climate Change Issue. He has been poet in residence for both the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and the Wordsworth Trust. He was the Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds in 2021-23.

Review :
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”. 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". Some creatures in Broadlands most likely have never been taken into poetry before. Little local lives are here everywhere 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. Matt Howard’s poems know that nature’s own writing – how a wren lives, say – will never be the same as our writing of nature. The wonder-soaked seeing and lovable cautious modesty of this collection is highly intelligent as to the gap between nature and nature-writing, but its poems make that same gap narrower than it is in almost any other comparable contemporary book.