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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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Reviews
"Tom Wayman's My Father's Cup evokes the intensity of the personal through a record of his father's dying: the poems come cumulatively to terms with the fact that one person's presence affects others, and that mortality alters one's perception of a place in the world." -W.H. New, Canadian Literature
"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
"Formally sophisticated yet wearing their learning humbly, these poems retrieve and preserve words and gestures from the flux of time, perhaps nowhere more hauntingly than in Wayman's elegy for Al Purdy, elder statesman and uneasy kindred spirit."- University of Toronto Quarterly
"The first group of poems consists of powerful, elegiac praise and mourning on the deaths of his mother and father. These poems are especially moving, due to Wayman's quick eye and ear for seemingly mundane details that become all-important, and, in ironic contrast, render an earthly spirituality to these devastating events... With the wonderfully elegiac yet totally imaginary 'A Meeting with Neruda in Toronto', Wayman restores our faith as readers in the power of words to transcend death, particularly the words of great poets, and Wayman just might be on the way to becoming one of them."- Event
"For decades, Wayman has played the role of poet-engagé, using his poetic platform to vocalize against the technocratic, bureaucratic and exploitative forces of capitalist society that debase human dignity....He accepts his father's imaginary 'cup of nothing' and fills it with the shimmering, liquid vibrancy of language."- Montreal Gazette
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