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.

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.