New & Selected Poems

Bill New, in these fabulous poems, becomes the stroller in the city, the busy idler, the flaneur. But he is also and always the seeker, the savant, risking night as well as day. He is seduced by the flawed city he dares to love; he invites the reader to an equal daring.
- Robert Kroetsch on YVR

The title of this book hints at both the complexity and the playfulness of New’s vision of the world?the wanderer trampling over the globe, finding trees, planting words. By the end of the collection I felt much as the archaeologist feels, in one of these poems, upon uncovering a language-tree, but even more like the farmer in the same poem who may not always know what he is looking at but recognizes that he is looking at something exceptional.

• Jack Hodgins on Underwood Log

Musically taut, the poems of Stone - Rain return us not only to coastal elements but to the subtle relations between people and the places they happen in or on. These are poems in the largest sense, tuned to the few quick beats in history any of us inhabit.

• Daphne Marlatt on Stone - Rain