The Order in Which We Do Things
The Poetry of Tom Wayman
- Publisher
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2014
- Category
- Canadian, Poetry
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781554589975
- Publish Date
- Mar 2014
- List Price
- $11.99
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781554589951
- Publish Date
- Feb 2014
- List Price
- $21.99
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Description
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 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.
About the authors
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.
Other titles by
Out of the Ordinary
New Poems
The Road to Appledore
Or How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place
How Can You Live Here?
Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back
Poems for a Dark Time
If You're Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free
Literature and Social Change
Helpless Angels
a book of music
The Shadows We Mistake for Love
Stories
Winter's Skin
Dirty Snow
