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.