With photography by Emily Ryalls

Matt Howard, the 2024–25 YSP / Laureate Fund poet in residence, has written a collection of new poems inspired by the sculptures, landscape, architecture and wildlife at YSP. Since August 2024, he has spent time staying here and has immersed himself in the life of the Park, connecting closely to the YSP community. 

Howard is a published poet and manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. He previously worked for the RSPB and his love of birds and the natural world informs much of his writing.

Created in response to Howard’s poems is a series of hand-printed silver gelatin photographs by Wakefield-based artist Emily Ryalls. With a feminist emphasis, she works with photography, performance and sculpture to shape spaces for engagement and connection. In April Ryalls had a residency at YSP in partnership with The Art House. She explored body mapping in the landscape with a group of women, making powerful and collaborative images that use nature in unison with analogue photographic techniques.

YSP supports a number of residencies, often working with other organisations, to offer artists time and space for reflection and the development of new work. The YSP / Laureate Fund Residency is supported by the T. S. Eliot Foundation and made possible by YSP Trustee and Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage.

The full collection of poetry by Matt Howard is available in a special publication with photography by Emily Ryalls. Purchase at YSP Shop from 2 August.

Resident

YSP Chapel

That song thrush, for instance, in the graveyard 
there among headstones, at its anvil 
outside this now secular space 
that today is bare, between installations.

But imagine him, in here, on this stone dais, 
the thrown, sledgehammering swings of his head.
Then quick-twitch, pecked-at mouthfuls, forging,
some craving for territory and a song to open,

here where I’ve stood, spoken and read poems – 
each shattering, an exploded view, colour and form,
a sermon of snail shells breaking.

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