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"Wayman rides the waves of local history and popular concerns to produce exceptionally fine poems."
-Alan Twigg
List of contents
TESTIMONIES
One Lump or Two
It's an Impossible Situation
Cost Plus
The Big Theft
Why Part-Time Staff Don't Receive Prorated Benefits
The Gates
Unemployed
Ties
A Cursing Poem: This Poem Wants Gordon Shrum to Die
The Thread
LOCAL TRAFFIC
Highway 2 North of Edmonton, Alberta
Resting by a Creek at the Cape Scott Trailhead
Watsonville
Canadian Culture: Another Riel Poem
At the Kootenay Gates
RV's
Kootenay Green (12 % Alcohol by Volume)
Sea-Cat
Vancouver Winter
Waiting for Mail
Initial Report
Hating Jews
Weak Things
Picnic in a Runaway Lane
The Shadows of the Afternoon
The Valley
ENIGMAS
After Failure
The Runners
Birds, in the Last of the Dark
There is a Love with a Wound
The Birds Circling the High Mountains
The Poet Milton Acorn Crosses into the Republic of Heaven
In a Small House on the Outskirts oHeaven
A YELLOW COTTAGE
A Yellow Cottage
DEFECTIVE PARTS OF SPEECH
Touching the Inner Life
Official Errata
Hierarchy
"An Auxiliary Used to Express Necessity, Duty, Obligation, Etc."
Translations
Mediaburn
Found
Have You Really Read All These?
Employment Zen
Sunday
Two Visitors
Doing the Word's Laundry
Technical Manual
LOST AND FOUND
The Poet
Inside Information: Telephone Directory Poems
GREED SUITE
In the Chambers of Commerce
The Emptiness of Business
Exchange
Authority
Economic Meditations
The Climate
Job Creation
Attitudes at the Top of a Hierarchy Influence Conduct Below
Folk Tune
The Plague
The Skeleton
The Salmon
The False Season
Revenge of the Future
MARSHALL-WELLS ILLUMINATION
Marshall-Wells Illumination
AFTERWORD: Work, Money, Authenticity
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
About the author
Tom Wayman was born in Ontario in 1945, but has spent most of his life in British Columbia. He has worked at a number of jobs, both blue and white-collar, across Canada and the U.S., and has helped bring into being a new movement of poetry in these countries--the incorporation of the actual conditions and effects of daily work. His poetry has been awarded the Canadian Authors' Association medal for poetry, the A.J.M. Smith Prize, first prize in the USA Bicentennial Poetry Awards competition, and the Acorn-Plantos Award; in 2003 he was shortlisted for the Governor-General's Literary Award. He has published more than a dozen collections of poems, six poetry anthologies, three collections of essays and three books of prose fiction. He has taught widely at the post-secondary level in Canada and the U.S., most recently (2002-2010) at the University of Calgary. Since 1989 he has been the Squire of "Appledore," his estate in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern BC.
Summary
Tom Wayman has earned an international reputation as a work poet, anthologist and essayist. This new collection of 64 poems deals with blue-collar working conditions, labour strikes and unemployment, the hierarchy of business and its philosophy of "money above all considerations" in the workplace. Some new travel poems and a few well-chosen comments on the uses and misuses of language are included, as well as a section consisting of 'found poems' from the Vancouver telephone book.
