If I told you that I just read a collection of poems which contained a few lines I’ll never forget—and that I knew I’d never forget them just as I was reading them for the first time—you’d ask me for that book title, wouldn’t you? The Visible Field. And the lines appear on page 1: 

I heard the sound of a mare
trying to turn around
in a stall too small for turning.

This deeply-considered language sets the tone for White’s debut full-length collection. Over the course of 62 pages, the poet’s gaze travels from memory to motherhood, from medicine to machine, and from wild dreamscapes to the natural world at her literal feet. 

The collection is divided into two unnamed sections. The third poem in section 1 is a chunky, lineated poem entitled “Girlhood.” Our speaker uses the physical weight of rocks to carry a central metaphor forward:

Though we were but girls,
we had pockets. We filled our pockets with balls of iron as we walked until our
pants hung heavy on our hips.

Some things are heavy in the world of these poems, and some things get heavy with the passage of time. White seems to have chosen a rummaging-around-in-the-imagination over a conventional narrative structure. Her approach felt refreshing to this reader. Old habits had me expecting resolution where it was seldom offered. Tenderness, yes. Wit, yes. Resolution, not often. Because these poems mirror life at the same time that they exist as art.

But back to that mare for a moment. See her stuck inside the stall, wishing to turn toward that which she cannot see. She is both image and metaphor, the observed and the observer, animal and woman. 

The Visible Field works its magic through mastery of line, its dry wit, and by creating and sustaining tension between real life and the keen power of imagination.

— Dara-Lyn Shrager

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