Tom Wayman’s latest poetry collection is full of surprises. We might find him ruminating on a handful of dirt, commiserating as a leaf or travelling back in time to visit with a ghost of his past. These are heartfelt poems inflected with a fiery element of anger and frustration. They are also observations on a world turned upside down.
For Wayman, a poem can be found in virtually anything.
For Wayman, a poem can be found in virtually anything —an experience, a lost love, the death of a friend, but like the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, it can also surface from an aspect of nature. Gazing at a dried fir needle transports him to a reminiscence of childhood. A “November raindrop” carries him to “a narrow/ chapel or sanctuary/ or tunnel, bright with the glow/ of walls of translucent quartz.”
“I scooped up some earth,” he writes. “Grasped it in my palm/ ‘Who do you belong to?’ I asked.” So begins a dialogue about how we are all transients “not to be owned – both of us/ only travelling through/ back to the stars.” Elsewhere, “Snowflakes descend purposefully/ or wistfully/ but, surrounded by their tiny peers/ each is confident they together will soon/ hide the meadows, driveways, roofs.” Another reflection on the marvels of nature.
Wayman was born in 1945 in Ontario, but has lived next-door to nature in the small community of Winlaw, BC, for many years. It is here that he observes nature and draws inspiration for his work. It is also where he plays the role of teacher, environmental activist and social critic. His poetry is informed by those experiences, but perhaps equally by his role as a worker-poet. The Canadian Encyclopedia correctly calls him “an ardent spokesman and advocate of the workplace.”
The book is organized in sections, each one dedicated to Wayman’s thoughts about human activities and those of the natural world. Before each section he explains where the poems came from. In “Seed, Nail, Snowfall,” he discusses “the interior world of particular objects. In the case of carrot seed, he wonders “what it would be like to climb inside.”
This introspection is repeated elsewhere. In the poem “Glass Blade,” he sees “an ark/ enclosing the living and the dead.” In another, “I venture inside the wind” to talk to a tree. A coffee bean’s odour prompts a thought on “strivers: workaholics, men and women/ desperate to succeed.”
In a final section on “The Writing Life,” Wayman discusses why people say they hate poetry. “Someone might dislike this or that kind of music, but he or she doesn’t say, ‘I hate music’,” he muses in the introduction. “Ditto movies. Or drawings and paintings. People’s interactions with poetry in school, however, are such that a majority of them regard the artform thereafter as something they loathe.”
Perhaps the last poems dispel that view, undo the failure of education, and reveal a poet sharing his love of language. In “Dog Eat Dog In the Dictionary,” for example, he invents a dialogue of words fearing that the dictionary will delete some to make room for newcomers.
In “Bear Habitat in the New Yorker,” he shews away a little black bear. The animal wants food, “I want a poem/ in The New Yorker … I want a million people/ not to read my poem as they leaf past it/ looking for a funnier cartoon.”
In “Poets Are the Janitors of the Human Heart,” the final poem in this intimate collection, Wayman articulates the role of the poet:
Like most challenging but repetitious work
Necessary to keep a society or a life functional,
The poet’s tasks are largely judged
Beneath consideration, ignorable,
Yet shift after shift, their labour restores
A vibrancy to what has been soiled,
Degraded, damaged,
Enabling the owner of the heart
To turn off the alarm system,
Push back retractable shutters,
Then open the doors to the world
One more time.
Sometimes referred to as the Studs Terkel of working-class poets, Wayman has been a plain-talking advocate for people’s rights, releasing more than 20 titles. Among my favourites are the 1981 anthology Going for Coffee and his 1983 collection of essays Inside Job.
Throughout all of it, he has truly earned his poet-janitor title. We are lucky to have him.
Tom Wayman’s prolific literary career includes writing more than twenty poetry collections, three collections of critical and cultural essays, three books of short fiction and a novel, as well as editing six poetry anthologies. He received British Columbia’s 2022 George Woodcock Award for Lifetime Achievement in the literary arts. In 2015, he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Drive commemorating his championing of people writing for themselves about their daily employment. He won the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards prize for fiction in 2016 (for the short story collection, The Shadows We Mistake for Love) and for poetry in 2023 (for Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time). His memoir, The Road to Appledore (or How I Went Back to The Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place), was published in 2024. Wayman lives in Winlaw, BC, and his website is www.tomwayman.com.
Publisher: Harbour Publishing (March 4, 2025)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 140 pages
ISBN: 9781998526123
Ron Verzuh is a writer, historian and book reviewer. His most recent book is Smelter Wars: A Rebellious Red Trade Union Fights for Its Life in Wartime Western Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022). His other books include Radical Rag: The Pioneer Labour Press in Canada and Underground Times: Canada’s Flower-Child Revolutionaries. His work has appeared in academic journals, magazines, newspapers and on web sites.
