Reviewed by L. Lois
Field of Vision
by Stephanie Horvath
Penguin
November 2026, Paperback, 80 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0143139393
We look at the world through a lens colored by our experiences, fogged by our emotions. In her new collection, poet Stephanie Horvath runs after the deer peering at her through her binoculars, but she’s stopped short by the questions tumbling out of her rucksack. One by one, she documents her Field of Vision for us to consider. The reader is delighted to help Horvath sort life’s messiness into lines that whistle.
Everywhere Horvath goes, from California to Maine, she looks through her spyglass, at the field, in the hills, hunkered in at the B&B where she is not a guest. She wonders, in the cleverness of poetic conundrum, how she became pregnant, why she is a mother, who this man she loved has become.
There are men in this book, but Horvath has packed them at the bottom of her bag and is digging around with one hand, feeling her way towards their meaning in her travels. Father is important, as fathers of daughters are wont to be. Husband might be lover, might be forgotten. Son is prince, but daughter may yet appear. Grandfather guides, but it is grandmother who paid for the ticket across the ocean.
…clear divide between the waves / and the mouth of the bay, which had to begin / with itself to end up this way. (“Constitutional”, 5)
With a one-word title, a poem becomes a political statement, a thermometer of the zeitgeist. But Horvath refuses to settle down. Her North Star drives a quest for understanding. She is wondering about meaning and purpose, particularly when answers aren’t obvious. How do we know when it’s good? How do we know it’s enough? Where does the poem end?
I packed my clothes into black garbage bags. // I wore my car like a coat and kept moving. (“Yucca Valley”, 41)
This collection is about disappointment, how life comes on big then ends up confusing the drama with mundane facts. Like a birth following on the heels of love. Or inconvenient hauntings from a previous generation. Maybe wanderlust always ends up having to look through a crack growing across the windshield.
…Pulling the ticks / from the under-sunned portions of my body. // Why do some people ruin their own lives willfully? (“Barton’s Motel”, 21)
The deer may harbor the tick, but Horvath won’t be denied the solace of nature. Her poems return to the land, over and over. In her roaming, in her tears, in her rants. Loves might drive one to leave, but the arms of the hills are always spread. And, when days are dark and the dirt is cloying, there is water. Always, there will be the comfort of water.
I find myself hiding again / and considering the cruelty. How nature / seems terrible, but it’s the only thing. (“A New New England”, 15)
The poet is a master of the line break. She understands how an ending is where the emotions squat. They rest there, or they are jostled. It’s where they sigh or exclaim. In the hands of a master conductor like Horvath, they command the wind section to stop, so the violins can lament alone. But then the wand lifts again, the writer’s wrist flicks, and the timpani crashes into the scene. The reader is powerless before such lyricism in action.
Penguin Poets picks the best for its annual National Poetry Series and Horvath is 2025’s champion, leading directly to her Field of Vision release. It’s unsurprising that Horvath names W.S. Merwin and Louise Glück as influences. The opening lines of this collection startle the reader awake in the most pleasant way, then the water’s flow carries us home. Here’s a current you can carry in your purse; a salve you can drink in one draught.
…I shut up in favor / of sounds from the river, and the guardian woodpeckers / again and again at their pockmarked trees. (“Finale of Seem”, 38)
About the reviewer: L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting into her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies. Her poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, The Brussels Review, Hanging Loose Magazine, Poetry Pause, The Mid-Atlantic Review, and other publications. L. Lois is a Member of the League of Canadian Poets, and is a First Reader for Bellevue Literary Review and Quibble Lit. A selection of her published work is linked at https://poeting.my.canva.site.