Matt Howard poem in New Statesman

Matt Howard's ‘The Pond’ featured in a recent issue of The New Statesman. The poem focuses on a spring 'awakening':

Here’s the start of a new sense of things –
just into March, the light and air fuller
and that mallard, so still there at the edge,
her heaviness pending, neck stretched,
not at rest; she can only be considering
her own streaked reflection, herself, held there
in the shade, and in the clay-backed mirror
of water, with no call for contact or confrontation,
just caught in a glance of the ways things are;
meeting a fresh slant of our mirrored selves;
now surely this is how it all begins, continues,
as this one, then another and then another.

Matt’s first full collection of poems, titled Gall, was published by the poetry magazine The Rialto in 2018 and won the inaugural Laurel Prize award for best first collection.  He is currently working on his second, Broadlands, which is due out next year from Bloodaxe. prior to arriving at the University of Leeds as Douglas Caster Fellow in Poetry Matt worked for the RSPB.