Field of Vision

From National Poetry Series winner Stephanie Horvath, a haunting, dreamlike odyssey through the American countryside

In Field of Vision, we traverse the thresholds of past and future, reality and dream, as we accompany the speaker through deserts, forests, rivers, and coasts. She raises her newborn son in rural Vermont; in a California desert she thinks of the life she left behind in the Midwest; she moves to an island in Maine to work at an old motel. These moments capture, viscerally and intimately, the sense of the gothic in rural America—dark, damp dirt on one’s hands, a river that wends its way through fog, the decay of wet leaves on a forest floor, a desert over which vultures circle. A meditation on the horror and resplendence of nature, Field of Vision invokes the ancient history that weaves into each of our individual histories—the earth, the animals, the fossils, the primordial echoes that shape us all.