'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

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.

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