"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
About the Author: W.H. (Bill) New retired in 2003 as University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. A native of Vancouver, he earned an M.A. in Canadian Literature from UBC in 1963.?In 1966 he was awarded his PhD from the University of Leeds, where he specialized in the English-language literatures of the Commonwealth. He then returned to the University of B.C. to set up a Commonwealth/ Postcolonial Literatures program.

Honoured by the Killam Research and Teaching Prizes (1988, 1996), the Gabrielle Roy Award (1988), the Jacob Biely Prize (1995), the Association of Canadian Studies Award of Merit (2000), and the CUFA Award for Career Achievement (2001), he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1986. In 2004 he was awarded the Governor General's International Award for Canadian Studies and the Lorne Pierce Medal for his contributions to critical and creative writing.?He has taught or lectured in Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, the UK, and the USA. In 2002, The University of Toronto Press published his Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. It has been praised in Canada and the UK for its innovative perspective and described in France as indispensable. In 2006 he was awarded the Order of Canada. Recently he received the 20th Annual George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.