Many thanks to Pat Edwards and London Grip for this wonderful review of Rae Howells' new poetry collection This Common Uncommon:
‘As we open this book we are straight away presented with a stark reminder that many things we hold dear – relationships, old buildings, institutions, and indeed wild places – can feel so ordinary, familiar, everyday, as to be easily taken for granted. Rae Howells cautions us to look, be present, fully experience these things and even fight for them, especially when suddenly their existence is threatened.
[…]
This is glorious nature writing redolent with colour, texture, smell.
[…]
Many readers of this book will undoubtedly know and love this common and fear for its survival. Many, like me, will not be so familiar with it. However, I suspect we all know threatened wild spaces local to us, and share the deep concern that our need for housing may one day overtake our perhaps greater need to conserve rare and special habitat. Howells has written something worth reading, something driven by both her intense love of this place and her understanding that once such a place is lost, there is the dreadful, empty permanence about its passing:
List the absences: the lost, the missing. Soon /
you will not be here to notice, either. /
Your eyes closed on the world and hard, like coins /
& I wonder if we will have learned anything.'
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