Through the poems of Gene Dancers Matt Howard again brings a poetry of exhilarating encounter with a vast range of flora and fauna. This third collection continues a poetry that is working always for species and habitats, that in itself is a different kind of ecological survey, charting violence, care, the beautiful along with the terrible in the more-than-human world and within our own natures.
These are also poems of place, that travel out from the locale of Howard’s native Norfolk to consider an ever-wider imagining towards yet more species and indeed other times. The panoramic of the collection is restless but as focused as the bounding of light through the eye of a hare, taking in Ancient Nineveh, the Cave of Hands, Dust Bowl America, the Pantanal, even the trajectory of a meteorite from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter as it touches down on a suburban driveway somewhere in Gloucestershire.
The collection also includes Resident , 15 poems emerging from a year as poet in residence at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A time and place that afforded a new formal impetus and energy.
Like the fen raft spider, the poems in Gene Dancers work for their own moments of dispersal, casting out as ‘citizens of anywhere, / so of everywhere, of hope / and however far that may carry’.
Gene Dancers is Matt Howard’s third collection, following his debut Gall (2018) from The Rialto , which won the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize. His second collection, Broadlands (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), won the poetry category of the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2025 from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland), an award which recognises work with an ecological theme.
‘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 , on ‘Marbled Orb Weaver’ from Broadlands
‘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
'Howard's special skill is to vividly bring to life the animals and plants that he knows so well and that belong to the precarious but strong world of nature, with its continuous cycle of renewal. We, too, are involved – sometimes helping, sometimes destroying what is essential. His language is clear and his descriptions are full of the small details that make images jump into the imagination, yet there are underlying thoughts or beliefs which make these poems well worth careful re-reading.' – Ann Skea, Midwest Book Review
‘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
‘Some creatures in Broadlands most likely have never been taken into poetry before. Little local lives are here everywhere 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. Matt Howard’s poems know that nature’s own writing – how a wren lives, say – will never be the same as our writing of nature. The wonder-soaked seeing and lovable cautious modesty of this collection is highly intelligent as to the gap between nature and nature-writing, but its poems make that same gap narrower than it is in almost any other comparable contemporary book.’ – Tim Dee
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