Vermont poet laureate Bianca Stone’s The Near and Distant World begins with an epigraph from Wallace Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” a poem which asserts that the stuff of the world transcends the power of words:
In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,
The town, the weather, in a casual litter,
Together, said words of the world are the life of the world.
In fact, many of the poems in Stone’s latest, released last week, draw a distinction between theory and abstraction versus the material world.
Stone lives in Goshen at the Ruth Stone House, the former home of her grandmother, the late poet Ruth Stone. As program director and a board member of the Ruth Stone Foundation, she organizes events and retreats at the house and teaches classes on poetry and poetic study. She is also a visual artist and scholar and host of the “Ode & Psyche Podcast.” Author of four previous poetry collections, Stone has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Poets and Writers, and the Nation. Her last book of poems, What Is Otherwise Infinite, received the 2022 Vermont Book Award.
True to its title, moves from near to far in metaphor and syntax. The book’s 51 poems do not linger on the threshold but toss the reader back and forth between ideas, places and historical moments. The poems address topics such as poetry, translation, religion, film, art, nature, mortality and love. The common denominator is the movement from near to far and back again.
“Old Bio in Snow,” the first poem in the volume, begins with life on the brink, where “There’s always a snowstorm coming”; by the end, the snow “falls on your face / and ends.” We meet a world where anticipation and trepidation might transform into wonder or regret. Seeing rather than knowing and feeling rather than thinking preoccupy this poet.
In “Theory,” Stone reminds us of Stevens’ point: “in the night, only the mad wind means.” “What’s Poetry Like?” features an unexpectedly intimate conversation with an internet technician in Brooklyn. “I am thinking of what it means to be alive in this world,” Stone muses, “I want to get it not right but near.”
In most of these poems, the physical world holds more sense than our ideas about it or ourselves. From the start, in “Old Bio in Snow,” change itself is the point, and the signs we try to interpret are mere remnants.
but everything shifts, one moment
to the next, and leaves
a dark stain where it was.
Perhaps the best example of Stone’s insistence that meaning is lodged in the material world is “Memory Palace,” where the regal notion of a house for memory is immediately replaced by a grim image of bloat and decay:
I have no memory palace.
I have tomato-paste cans bloated
on a sagging plywood shelf.
Though bloated, cheap and sagging, the cans immediately grab a seat in the reader’s own memory house. It is hard to get the image out of our minds. This insistence reminds us how ideas of the past cannot be stored in abstract forms but rest instead in the most mundane objects.
Several poems draw explicit connections to philosophy, psychoanalysis and other poets. Some, such as “Ovid,” appear to encapsulate the work of an admired predecessor. Other poems, such as “Civilization and Its Discontents,” express fatigue at “the whole effort of scrutinizing the dream.”
In “Tarkovsky’s Mirror,” Stone summarizes the great film and then invites the reader to enter its world with her: “We spring in and out of color.” But in the end, it is the speaker and her own mother in the scene, “closely watched, like fire: the first mirror, the first object, the first house, burning.” Original as the claim is, these two might easily be any reader and their own mother. For each of us, our own mother is in fact the first object, the first mirror and the beginning of our own time.
Stone is at her best when she’s writing about loss and grief. In The Near and Distant World, Rainer Maria Rilke’s elegies serve as inspiration. What is near becomes distant, because we are mortal, and life only moves in one direction.
Some of these poems are explicitly elegies while others hover on the precipice between life and death. “Nothing Is Ever Finished or Abandoned” asserts: “Always I am preparing the end.” “Thoughts at the Grave” invokes her own name, an apparent meditation on the entire volume: “I am considering a stone. / Even alone I feel I am in another performance. / Even the near world is distant.” The poem that directly invokes Rilke, “The Translation Elegies,” ends with the “benumbed spectacle / of historic grief.”
Although Stone often navigates the complexities of familial and romantic love, or the paradoxes of identity and experience, these poems consider all aspects of personal identity as essential to the broader human experience. In “All Ye Who Enter Here,” Stone asks us to think with her about “One life, this one life—it is all so near / distant. I abandoned, I held. I returned. I heard the waves. And / hearing the waves, I dreamed back the world.” Her poems invite us to dream with her.
“In Shadow, Who Made These Words”
by Bianca Stone
The original print version of this article was headlined “No Memory Palace | Book review: The Near and Distant World, Bianca Stone”
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This article appears in January 21 • 2026.
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