Rae Howells | poetry - journalism - research


poems "electric with love and loss"



Rae Howells is a prize-winning Welsh poet, journalist, academic and lavender farmer from Swansea. Her poetry has featured in a wide range of journals and anthologies. Rae's first collection, The language of bees, explores nature, motherhood and miscarriage and how we cope with the loss of what is most precious to us.


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"rich in love, for the world that we are inseperatble from and on the verge of destroying"



How can we have hope in a world that is dying? With a forensic eye, Howells takes us on a journey through ordinary human lives and the extraordinary natural world we are in danger of losing. The carder bee carries the story of a colony, a species, and, ultimately, the fate of all life on earth. The mermaid weaves an almost beautiful tale of a tragic miscarriage. The magpie writes yearning letters to her lost lover. The brilliant kingfisher flits through the mind of a woman with dementia. Through each exacting portrait, we begin to understand something special, a language of bees, and discover for ourselves how intimately we are all connected and what the natural world is trying to tell us.


Buy The Language of Bees

I found I knew the words spoken by this hiveborn voice,
that here was more than a simple dash to join the dots between flowers,
but morse code, an SOS
the bass clef come to life





Rae Howells is a poet, journalist, academic and lavender farmer from Swansea. She's a fluent Welsh speaker and has colour-grapheme synaesthesia. She’s won both the Welsh International and Rialto Nature and Place poetry competitions and been shortlisted in several more. Her work has featured in a wide range of journals including Magma, The Rialto, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Acumen, Envoi, Poetry Ireland, Black Bough, Marble and The Cardiff Review, as well as in anthologies including The Result is What You See Today (Poetry Business) and A470 (Arachne Press). Howells's pamphlet Bloom and Bones, co-authored with Jean James, was published by the Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2021. The language of bees is her first full collection.


In her day job, Rae is the Project Manager for NUJ Training Wales, a Welsh Government-funded journalism and media training scheme. A former journalist and hyperlocal newspaper editor, she has a PhD in journalism studies, specialising in local newspaper closures and the democratic deficit, and she co-authored the book Hyperlocal Journalism (Routledge, 2018). Rae is passionate about nature, the environment and the power of local communities. She grows lavender on the Gower Pensinsula and runs Gower Lavender, an eco-luxury cosmetic business. She is married to an archaeologist from Yorkshire and they have two daughters.



"Rae Howells' words are electric with the sparks of motherhood, love and loss. Even in their depictions of suffering and sorrow, her poems are alive, humming and pulsing in their assured acceptance of grief as an intrinsic part of life. In The language of bees, we are reminded of the significance of every earthly cell, from a pulsing spark on an ultrasound scan to a bee hibernating above a winter Pilates class"





Mari Ellis Dunning, author of Salacia, 2018



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