Cover Reveal: The Visible Field by Zoë Ryder White

Listen to yourself, the therapist said;

do you hear how you sound, she said,

and I heard the sound of a mare

trying to turn around

in a stall too small for turning.

Trying to know the other view.

This is not a metaphor

for an unhappy life.

This is how my body felt.

This is how my neurology followed its groove,

showed me a picture of a mare

in a stall too small for turning.

Mare’s shoulder pressed in one direction,

mare’s flank pressed in the other.

The torque involved.

The stillness at the center.

And field in every direction:

visible field.

Zoë Ryder White’s poems are strong and vital and astonishingly satisfying—and they are satisfying not only in their ease of movement from the real world to the symbolic one, their genius for metaphoric transformation, the narrative verve they display, their deep, visually alert representations of nature, their rhetorical keenness and toughness, but also, and most vitally, in their psychological transparency and intimacy. A spectacular book that can be read and read and read again.

The Visible Field moves with boundless enthusiasm for each moment's last burnishing. These poems let you curl into a space you didn't know existed yet somehow expected. Let’s call it the visible field of imagination. Zoë Ryder White knows how to get there. She writes, “The people in me keep me / up late talking, sometimes / laughing, carrying on." Every line is a chance to be curious by "the world, shucked, the world / inside the world."

The Visible Field pays such careful attention to the physical world that it cannot help but expose its concealments. How does this concealment change us? As the poet notes in the opening of “Interview”: “The fish, when split, had a belly full of plastic, but it was still a fish.” The hollows of the body, the pockets of dresses, vaults, “I am inside these birds,” she writes in one poem; the “dim rooms” inside a plum that has yet to come to fruition—all these are spaces of containment. In these poems we see that in dealing with attention to the world’s physicality, one is always dealing with the possibility of hiddenness. The body itself might be the greatest and most tactile representation of all that exists between flesh and consciousness, vessel and seed: “When I was an envelope, I enclosed /a red scrap,” Zoë Ryder White writes with her subtle grace. In The Visible Field, we see that the book itself is a casing which hides within itself a field of study: of a life, with its landscapes, children, friends and memories and confinements. Here is hidden vision, given to us by a specific poet, whose eye is generous and playful, who coaxes the readers to question the messiness of the whole business of language. “To read out of order / is to arrange one’s affection / deliberately,” one poem posits in its dissolution of the object of a book. I will continue ponder the idiosyncratic wisdoms of these poems.