Description
Book SynopsisTom Wayman's poetry has been published around the world to great acclaim. Wayman is one of Canada's most prolific and public poets, and his writing since the 1960s has been by turns angry, engaged, hopeful, tender, and hilarious. His voice and persona are his alone but simultaneously ours too. His recurring themes - work, mortality, love, lust, friendship, the natural world - make his work a poetry of human inevitabilities, a poetry that exults in the inevitability of seeing poetry in the everyday.
Wayman's craft is
poïesis (from the Ancient Greek ""to make"") - making a change, making a difference, making a ruckus, making the most of our time. His working life has always been inextricable from his writing one; his poems offer an honest and candid consideration of the ideological underpinnings, practical realities, and subtle beauties of a life lived on job sites and picket lines, in union halls, classrooms, and book-stuffed offices, and on the page itself.
The Order in Which We Do Things is a collection of more than thirty of Wayman's best poems, selected and introduced by Owen Percy. Percy's introduction explores the genesis of Wayman's print persona and contextualizes his politically engaged, conversational voice within the pantheon of its various publics. In his afterword, ""Work and Silence,"" Wayman reflects on his more than forty years in print as a work poet, and underlines poetry's sustained power to engage readers, invite solidarity, and stoke the fires of critical resistance to the order in which we do things.
Trade Review``Wayman...believes that poetry exists beyone 'the money economy' and because of this freedom it creates the highest potential to drive social change. His concerns are humanist and folksy, infused with the moral responsibility of integrity. This series, because of its...scope and space...allows the reader to see how Wayman's immersions in these moral concerns have developed and morphed from those of the lowly factory worker to those of acute environmental observance. Always the poems are permeated by intense attention to...a sense of justice.'' -- Micheline Maylor -- Alberta Views, June 2014, 201406
Table of Contents
- The Order in Which We Do Things: The Poetry of Tom Wayman, selected with an introduction by Owen Percy
- Foreword, Neil Besner
- Biographical Note
- Introduction: Wayman in Print: ""He Do the Polis in Different Voices,"" Owen Percy
- Days: Construction
- Picketing Supermarkets
- Wayman in Love
- The Country of Everyday: Literary Criticism
- The Factory Hour
- The Old Power
- Industrial Music
- Factory Time
- Garrison
- Friday Night in Early September at Morris and Sara Wayman's Farm, Roseneath, Ontario
- White Hand
- Silos
- Paper, Scissors, Stone
- The Face of Jack Munro
- A Cursing Poem: This Poem Wants Gordon Shrum to Die
- The Poet
- Defective Parts of Speech: Official Errata
- Did I Miss Anything?
- The Man Who Logged the West Ridge
- For William Stafford (1914-1993)
- War on a Round Planet
- Cup
- Epithalamium for a Former Lover
- Calgary
- Postmodern 911
- Mt. Gimli Pashtun
- Air Support
- Whistle
- The White Dogs
- Minutes
- Breath
- Afterword: Work and Silence, Tom Wayman
- Acknowledgements
