This Floating Ground: Broadlands By Matt Howard

There is a benediction hidden amongst the East Anglian reeds in Matt Howard’s beautifully constructed new collection of themed poems for Bloodaxe. For the relationship between us and our increasingly abused and neglected natural environment sometimes throws up surprises for which we should be grateful. The susceptibility of wetlands to recovery, when given time and care to do so, is a silent ministry whose bounty becomes increasingly visible; the process is gratifyingly irrepressible, like the Field Teachers and children who come to learn in the sodden ‘Fen Meadow’, where a ‘month’s fall / in little more than a day’ makes a quagmire of the peat. Howard’s narrator is floored by their commitment, reduced, in his grateful humility, to a simple ‘bless them’. As the kids jump and holler, they are sustained in their palpable joy by the gentle synaesthesia of the narrator’s closing words:


‘Just look at the air about them, the peat spatters,
that earthy freshness catching the breath.’

It is fitting, in this simple declaration of love for an ancient landscape, to find anger at its unthinking despoliation. Howard’s wish, as he witnesses the consequences of an act of unacknowledged vandalism, is an invocation of Contrapasso, that the ‘bastard or bastards’ – the indeterminate number hints at deliberate anonymity - should be hoisted by their own petards. We take vicarious pleasure in the poet’s gleeful schadenfreude, as he wishes the miscreants a punishment to fit their crime: ‘better yet’, he intones, that they should be skewered ‘topless’…

‘about their work, as the sap and hairs
of giant hogweed catch them,
so that they metamorphose
to a blistered imago,
all the shame bursting their skin.’ (‘Milk parsley / swallowtail’)

...Howard is forensically adept at detachment, at encapsulating the fixed, high-tensile focus of a spider, whose sole purpose dictates its resistless tenacity.The pain is exquisitely calculated, as felicitous as in one of Dante’s Circles of Hell. Here is natural revenge in microcosm, a metaphor, almost, for Howard’s wider ecopoetic mandate, and a tiny premonition of the grander corrections about to be visited upon us by climate change. For 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.

Howard’s visceral attachment to the Norfolk Broads, which betokens instinct as much as a feeling of Heimat, enables his poems to grow in tandem with the terrain they describe. Uplifted, fecund in despite, the poet’s words effect an impossible sleight-of-hand, making expression and subject seem interdependent. As bound by instinct, almost, as the ‘Marbled Orb Weaver’, Howard is forensically adept at detachment, at encapsulating the fixed, high-tensile focus of a spider, whose sole purpose dictates its resistless tenacity. The narrator’s description of a stolidity of evolutionary determinism is yielded as though under the gaze of a microscope:

‘Look how she can’t give in –
Jurassic proximity
of brain, venom gland, fang,
her book lung’s unreadable
breathing’.

This is fine writing, as attentive to the figurative aggrandisement of biological minutiae as Isabelle Galleymore’s steroidal world of the cephalopod, and as sensitive to the brutal logic of the evolutionary hierarchy as Tennyson’s visceral précis (see Howard’s wonderfully understated sestets in ‘Apocrypha I’ for ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’, as a herring gull is terminally glutted by a predated mole). The effect is repeated in the tiny universe of ‘Parasitoid and Host’, where the instinctive drive of the ichneumon wasp forces a symbiotic juxtaposition with the swallowtail butterfly larva in the ‘given and taken’ of Darwinian (the ichneumon is otherwise known as the ‘Darwin wasp’) inevitability. Aside from his predilection for research – he is an environmentalist – it is clear that Matt Howard finds a kind of affirming efficacy in the strange and ironic conjunction of species, to create something as beautiful and unlikely as his own tribute:

‘slicked, sure
in its wasp rigging,
dripping still
with the other, fully born
from the other’.

What sustains is the idea of fertility and growth, the overriding restoration of gaia; for every poem that considers future anxiety is a counter-positioning of teeming energy, of adaptation, in wetlands and polders accustomed to the biology of transition. You can hear its resurgence in the delicious relish of Howard’s words, often (mostly, even) in unprepossessing backwaters where the tortuous syntax of mud – ‘After / the bone-sink push and plod / of each dead man and ox’ – will yield, in the end, to murky light:

‘Lady’s smock and rushes
in the hollows; cowslip –
green-winged orchid, saw-wort
with meadow buttercup
and anthills on ridges’. (‘Ridge and Furrow’)

This poet’s sense of being in the moment in the natural world translates seamlessly elsewhere. His tenure at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere provokes a fine triptych, whose final octave distils a rare meditative beauty into a grey day, as if in homage to Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy’s, harmonised focus. Delivering a panoramic view, the narrator, again, finds reflected light - ‘when the tops are cloud / and water, and their quicksilver veins off the fells / rise unstaunched as pools of liquid slate’ (‘Amen’). The gentle sibilance of Howard’s words add immeasurably to a poem whose title and vision are another form of benediction.

The beautiful and profoundly affecting ‘Teneral’, whose title describes an insect’s transitory state, removes death’s human sting in its anticipation of renewal, if only in the sense of a new dawning.Lost in the language of the Latinate, the scientific and the vernacular – many poems in Broadlands include references that deliberately anchor their subject in rural Norfolk – Matt Howard is bound lexicographically by his own sense of purpose. Yet the process looks outward, opens up a strange terrain to possibility, gives the poet’s reflections space in which to breathe whilst encouraging his reader to reach for the dictionary. And sometimes the poems are privileged by the presence of words and terms whose sounds adhere to meaning with onomatopoeic plausibility. Like the ‘lumen’ of the orb weaver in ‘The Biology of Spiders’: Howard’s own italicised definition – ‘a strength of light or inner, cellular space’ – gives the object of his scrutiny scope for figurative illumination so that the focus and singularity of the spider, and its intricate tenancy, become poetically enchanted:

‘and a silken, amber flow decanted
down the gradient and camber of the side road’

The shape and sound of the words enable Howard to forge a link between man and landscape, to unify, like Wordsworth, ideas of natural provenance and wider human purpose. The beautiful and profoundly affecting ‘Teneral’, whose title describes an insect’s transitory state, removes death’s human sting in its anticipation of renewal, if only in the sense of a new dawning. Forget the physical decline, the narrator intones; consider, instead, that after…

‘…holding his stilled hand, a similar chitin
in any moulted case, there past that form’s pains
as all the atoms that flew together in him.’

The agglomeration of atoms that make up a ‘chitin’, an exoskeleton in insect terms, or a carapace, dissipate in death but there is consolation in recognition of the ‘order of things’.

‘Second-hand smoke’ is a brilliant dissection of emotional nuance as observed at the funeral of the narrator’s grandfather. Howard’s fascination with the language of biology and chemistry is turned to the purpose of irony in the bold and direct ‘Chemical Chorus’, whose statement of intent is delivered in the deliberately capitalised names of pesticides. The statement demands no subtlety of exposition, given the aggregate cost of these toxins to the environment of the Broads. Reinforcing the damage in hammer blows, the resounding closing line leaves the reader in no doubt as to the ongoing problem of land (mis)management:

‘GLYPHOSATE GLYPHOSATE GLYPHOSATE.’

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. For the process of connection-making ventures far beyond the land into a meditation on death, on elegy and on those who live and work within its compass. And at such moments, Howard most resembles the Romantics in attempting to define an environment in terms of those who shape or are shaped by it, like the village butcher, ‘Ancient Keeley, cleavering hocks in his white coat’, as much a rural constituent as any in John Clare (‘Hock’).

As the bird lifts into song, the poem wheels away at the same moment into the darker regions of memory...In a book of cross-sections and formal complexity (Howard’s formal approaches are as changeful as the weather), it is gratifying to find an intricate network of undercurrents cleaving effortfully in the direction of love, as though to underwrite the ways in which such a declaration might be achieved. As thought-provoking and as spectral as the terrain envisaged in certain lights, two of the most beautiful poems in Broadlands refuse to be circumscribed by conventional grids of reference. ‘Second-hand smoke’ is a brilliant dissection of emotional nuance as observed at the funeral of the narrator’s grandfather. Pivoting on the coterminous hurricane of 1987 and its confounding of meteorological certainty, Howard’s narrator finds grains of comfort, and also pain, in the unexpected detail: the undertaker’s assistant who cries at the mourners’ tears, manifesting ‘an indelicate empathy’, in Howard’s wonderfully concise reading; the mother’s fag flaring, ‘when pissed off’, to a sharp point; and the unreliability of memory as narrator is reminded of terrible, morbidly seductive and crematory binaries of fire, when he, 'or a boy about my age', burns a red admiral butterfly – ‘to light its wings, to see them blaze and just the small and vital ash of it’.

And most of all ‘Neurone’, whose interlacing of the first catching of synaptic life in a blackbird, and the ‘attrition’ of ‘motor shutdown’ in a family relative, is exquisitely rendered in six contemplative tercets. As the bird lifts into song, the poem wheels away at the same moment into the darker regions of memory, of the accoutrements of palliation, whose machinery – ‘throat suction, CPAP, the hoist’s whirring servo’ – dissolves, like laboured breathing, into redundancy, leaving the blackbird’s song in its wake:

‘that last moment, among all those sparks
of blackbirds starting up in the dark, singing
where the least thing is to have given everything.’

Even as early as July, Broadlands must be a candidate for best collection of 2024.


Broadlands is published by Bloodaxe Books (2024).

More information click here.