'Can poetry protect the natural world? Can it actually change the course of events? Many poets are attempting to do just that, but it’s not often that a collection is published with a specific purpose, centred on a particular location. Rae Howells’ latest book focuses on West Cross Common, a small area of peat-based heathland on the edge of Swansea, which is currently under threat of development. But these poems do far more than protest. They celebrate the minutiae of a rare and intricate habitat, the kind of inconspicuous scrubland that many of us would normally walk past without a second glance. […] These poems fulfil the author’s aim, stated in the introduction: they ‘give voice to the unheeded – the common itself, the plants and animals that live on it’. But they also dramatize a very real and ongoing tension. This is a book that delights in the small and the inconspicuous, forging a celebratory link between us and the areas of common land that we so often take for granted.’
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