Howard, Matt: Broadlands

Description

Bloodaxe Books, paperback

Publication Date: September 3, 2024

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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’sBroadlandsare 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 ofBroadlandsrises from a labour committed, ‘set on this floating ground’.

Broadlandsis Matt Howard’s second collection, following his debutGall(2018) fromThe 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.