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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
For almost thirty years, poet Tom Wayman has celebrated the language of everyday life and work. Praised for his wit, sensuality and conversational style, Wayman can weave the mundane with the mysterious and shed new light on both.
In his latest collection, My Father's Cup, Wayman examines the conflicting emotions that arise when a parent dies, when faith withers, when awareness of one's own mortality grows. But this book is as light as it is serious, and Wayman's fans will be pleased to see that the "guru of the work poetry movement" continues to dissect aspects of our work-obsessed culture with insight and humour.
As a careful observer of people, nature and relationships, Wayman has a seemingly effortless ability to take his readers scrambling up steep mountains, through union negotiations, to funerals and into lovers' bedrooms. He also has a rare gift for weaving science and philosophy into engaging poems, sharing epiphanies while posing intriguing questions.
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"Wayman's strength, and it is great, lies in his ability to strip away the sheath blocking our understanding of common experience....He doesn't overreach. He knows what detail to add and when to allow the story to tell itself. In this simplicity he is a Canadian Neruda."
- Prairie Fire
