The Order in Which We Do Things: The Poetry of Tom Wayman

Tom 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 themesâwork, mortality, love, lust, friendship, the natural worldâmake 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")âmaking 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.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents for 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: âHe Do the Polis in Different Voices,â 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

About the Author :
Tom Wayman has published nineteen poetry collections, edited six anthologies of poets writing about their employment, and published three collections of essays on labour arts. He has taught at the post-secondary level in the United States and Canada and co-founded the Vancouver Industrial Writers Union and the Vancouver Centre of the Kootenay School of Writing. Wayman has been the recipient of several significant literary awards over his career, most recently the 2013 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry for his book Dirty Snow . Owen Percy is a teacher, writer, editor, and critic of North American and postcolonial literature. He earned his Ph.D. in Canadian literature and literary culture from the University of Calgary in 2010. He is a professor of literary studies at Sheridan College in Brampton, Ontario

Review :
``Wayman...believes that poetry exists beyone âthe money economyâ 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