Inventing What We Need to Know: Poems (Paperback or Softback)

This book asks questions about storytelling---what stories have we been told, what stories do we tell others, what stories do we even tell ourselves? How do all these stories (even the ones we think we’ve forgotten) shape us? Are there stories we accept as we grow through different stages of life---and other stories we reject (or think we’ve rejected)? Spinning across decades, like a false memoir, these poems track the tales and lies and histories and aspirations that shape the lives of everyone . . . and possibly affect the future.

"For all its English strangeness, it’s smart stuff. In a city that has broken out of its parenthesis, in short a city that is dead and gone, to build a new city in its place, it is a book of a child facing death. In poem after poem, New recalls moments of warning, when death was fully present—a burning house, for instance—but distant to a child’s eye. Older now, with a clear eye on mortality, he now tells these stories with clearer eyes, to educate the child." ---Harold Rhenisch, The BC Review

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS POETRY COLLECTIONS BY W.H. NEW
"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.... 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

"In addition to being a call to action, poetry can also be a source of healing. It flies under the radar, nests in the ear, and can alter our chemistry, our way of thinking. How does it do this? It employs rhythmic strategies and economies of language that slow time down, make us wince, curse, laugh, weep or rejoice by using the rhythms of ordinary speech, heightened by syllabic stress patterns, surprising imagery, and acoustic pleasures such as the repetition of vowels and consonants, all of which slow us down, make us pause, consider, and experience what has been called 'felt time.' W.H. (Bill) New delivers much of this verbal richness in spades, not just in poetry, but also throughout his writings. He’s always alert to the multiple meanings and connotations in words.... Not surprisingly, given his Protean capacities, he has ... become a prolific and gifted poet." ---Gary Geddes, The Ormsby Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William New was born in 1938 in Vancouver. A graduate of UBC and the University of Leeds, and a prize-winning teacher and writer, he taught at UBC for almost four decades. Author and editor of some fifty books and several scores of essays and reviews, he was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal in 2004. For his services to creative and critical writing he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006. His creative works include five books for children, from Vanilla Gorilla (1998) to the internationally honoured The Year I Was Grounded (2008); and his poetry collections include Science Lessons (1996), Underwood Log (2004, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award), YVR (2011, winner of the City of Vancouver Award), Neighbours (2017), and In the Plague Year (2021).