Field of Vision

“It has been said so often that the environmental crisis of our moment is too large to see. And yet poets keep begging to differ. Stephanie Horvath takes lyric’s intimate quietness and expands it with dream logic, so something far too large for a single voice can be held inside one, briefly, without either breaking.” —Juliana Spahr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ars Poetica

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. These poems capture, viscerally and intimately, a sense of deep time in the rural landscape—dark, damp dirt on one’s hands, a desert over which vultures circle, the decay of wet leaves on a forest floor. 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.