D. A. Prince reviews Broadlands by Matt Howard (Bloodaxe, 2024)
Stand in Late May
Take this manky ditch off the Yare,
this heat-stink of algae blooming –
what with all the ploughing to the margins,
abstraction of water, and run-off
into the marshes, there’s such choked chances.
But in and about this scrutty reed,
here at least, a rhizal stand of yellow flag again.
Broadsword stems, forged from the sunk under
blades that splay to these blazing iris tongues,
each with the little zag of their nectar guide.
What’s to be done but keep going?
The world is in such increments.
With so much more and more at stake,
I tell you now, for what it’s worth,
here’s where I hilt my every word.
The Norfolk Broads: did you know it’s a national park? The tourist board does a glossy job promoting the area for boating holidays, along with lists of things to do and places to eat, all under blue skies. I doubt if they will be promoting a collection of poems that revels in “all the bent-up reed, the bowed, claggy spikelets and such an ammoniacal stench” (‘Another Murmuration’). Matt Howard doesn’t so much as invite observers into its natural world as grab readers by the scruff of their necks and haul them – often on their knees – to get in close and dirty:
Take this manky ditch off the Yare,
this heat-stink of algae blooming —
what with all the ploughing to the margins
It’s a strong opening to the collection, this whole poem a manifesto for what’s to come. We know where we are with “manky”: nothing romantic or sentimental, no soaring mountain tops or musings on the beauty of nature, no Wordsworthian philosophising. This land is pungent and badly managed: that’s how it is in the twenty-first century. But it’s not a devastated wasteland either. Matt Howard is a naturalist who puts in the physical and unglamorous hard labour of maintaining these squelchy habitats for the varied creatures who make this their home. They may not all be Instagram-able or telegenic but they are an integral part of the whole world of the Broads. ‘Stand in Late May’ ends:
What’s to be done but keep going?
The world is in such increments.
With so much more and more at stake,
I tell you now, for what it’s worth,
here’s where I hilt my every word.
Yes: “increments”. That’s what Howard will make us see and with words that are given a “hilt” like a dagger. 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.
Matt Howard doesn’t so much as invite observers into its natural world as grab readers by the scruff of their necks and haul them – often on their knees – to get in close and dirty
Even a title can emphasise how significant the specific is. ‘Nest Surveying 1, 17/4/17: TL 86843 80674’ is as precise as it can get:
Note it all down. Shadwell Track, bottom wood;
this is concerned with time and known position —
the GPS app gives the coordinates
(from the precision of ground clocks synchronised
with satellites’ orbiting planes and atomic clocks).
In the space of one stanza we’re shifted from the ground under our feet – “down” and “bottom wood” are quietly doing more work than might appear at first – to the orbiting satellites. Time and place and record-keeping. “But still, you have to follow the quick of a wren’s mind.” That’s what it’s all for, checking on the health of a wren’s nest, the eggs that will be future birds, and knowing how to do it exactly:
And sure she’s momentarily off, kneel.
Snake the burr of your left arm, blind, to the entrance,
then inside, place a fingertip on the whelm of each.
Note: four eggs in total, unpredated, cold or just cooling —
which is the beginning of an answer to everything.
It’s an ambivalent ending, like much in life. Howard’s work is attending to what might, just might, keep things alive in the future, whether it’s by driving a rotary ditcher to clear foot drains (“Each pass is to pass on. What is and will yet be. / Here’s grazing for wigeon and pink-feet / in a matter of weeks”) or by enthusing primary school children on a wet day out. There’s a nice connection between the two as well: ‘See how the rotary ditcher is’ ends with the solid ground –
There’s all the earth moved. The key turned,
now the heavy-legged comedown from the cab,
back to the hardstanding under your boots.
– while ‘Fen Meadow’ lets the children move the earth and simultaneously learn about the composition of fens, and why –
this ground cuts up under their feet, that here,
we’re only floating on all the grown and growing things,
and by jumping together, we move the whole world.
Up they go, bewildered and delighted,
almost instantly landing, feeling the ground shift and righting.
Howard doesn’t describe their voices: he doesn’t need to. My inner ear provides the soundscape. Ministers of Education (past and present), take note.
This poet uses free form although there are nods to fashionable poetic tropes. ‘Hock’ is a prose poem, as though including one is obligatory. But on the facing page, ‘Second-hand smoke’ (which could, in another life, have been a prose poem) uses longer lines and reveals how much the line breaks add to what is essentially a private reverie, moving from meeting-room tedium (via the 1987 storm, Howard’s grandfather’s funeral, the undertaker, and his mother’s smoking) to the ending and the casual cruelty of boys. The rhythm of personal thought-patterns, that map of loose connections, sits better when not presented as prose.
It’s a measure of the force within these poems that can make a spider-averse mud-avoider want to go and see for myself.
‘Chemical Chorus’ is both a list poem (poisonous chemicals) and a visual-impact poem, in that the separate items are all in capitals shouting from the page. It makes a point, of course, but in a monotone. ‘Another Murmuration’ has the spaced phrasing that you might expect in a poem about a gathering of starlings but it’s counterweighted by the final stanza, three long lines about the volunteers in the reserve working party, the people on the ground dealing with the habitat management plan. It’s the only instance where Howard uses a lot of arty white space so I wonder if this is a sly comment on that format. And also there’s one of those poems where you have to turn the book through 90 degrees to read it …
While the natural world is central, not all the poems are centred on the fens. ‘The Dreams of the Salmon Farmer and His Wife’ and ‘The Stag at the Gate – after Ferenc Juhász’ explore other lives, as do poems rising from encounters with medieval history. These are good company for poems dealing with the fen fauna and show the same high level of observation. ‘On the snail in medieval manuscripts’, for example, peers into the detail of a fantasy battle where a snail is
[…] proud
of its shell and rendered
inquisitive with such exquisite
detailing of the vulvic
and sac-skin wrinkliness
of its foot, draping
the battlements’ teeth.
It takes an observer of real snail-life to achieve such accuracy of depiction and at the same time write with relish. ‘An Acte for the preservation of Grayne, 1566’ is a found poem, a densely-detailed list of the monetary rewards for the heads of dead birds (birds that “steal” from crops) but also creatures that we now view more kindly, such hedgehogs, moles, kingfishers. The modern world can be as ruthless as the past: Howard doesn’t shy away from his own acts of cruelty as a child – the times when “Boredom spawns its own kinds of wickedness” (‘Wade’s’) such as killing small fish, while the three ‘Apocrypha’ poems each describe what I would like to think is fantasy, an extension of how the natural world is casually brutal in ways we can hardly imagine. I’ll spare you the details. The point here is that I’m not sure whether Howard is describing fantasy or reality, and that’s why the poems stay with me.
Back to the real natural world, in which Howard’s strength as a poet is rooted, making knowledge of that world memorable. If I read an article on swallowtail butterflies I probably wouldn’t remember their preferred habitat; Howard’s ‘Milk parsley / Swallowtail: 7th-11th July 2017’ means I won’t forget:
All cults must have their curses:
may this curse of losses befall
the bastard or bastards
who dug out milk parsley at Hickling
taking with it as many as twenty
or more swallowtail caterpillars.
Like any good curse, the poem expands – into physical detail of exactly how the perpetrators will suffer. It’s very satisfying, and also a reminder that so few poets write curses these days. I wouldn’t want to see a full collection but there’s a place, I think, for a revival of that robust medieval form.
Fen raft spiders, Norfolk hawkers, four-spotted chasers: the poems hum with closely observed insect life. There are pieces about a human relationship alongside these, yet it’s the day job on the fen that pulls me in and insists that I look – or watch, or see (Howard is relentlessly energetic in commanding my attention) – much like the excited primary school kids. It’s a measure of the force within this collection that it makes me, a spider-averse mud-avoider, want to go and see for myself.
D. A. Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second collection, Common Ground (HappenStance, 2014), won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her most recent collection, The Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022.
‘Stand in Late May’ is from Broadlands (Bloodaxe, 2024) – thanks to Matt Howard and to Bloodaxe Books for letting us publish it.
